The present invention provides a port-based technique to manage processing resources that can be utilized by an Operating System. The systems and methods consider time parallelism and pre-emption through sends, receives, and execution context, wherein scheduling of execution units occurs via (aperiodic and/or periodic) communication rather than time slicing. The systems and methods employ a resource manager that listens behind a port associated with a processor, which enables the processor to transition to a reduced power consumption state. When a request for processing resources arrives at the port, the resource manager can allocate the processing resources, wake the processor, and/or return a communication, which can include a location of allocated memory and an execution context of the processor, to a reply channel. Alternatively, the resource manager can preempt the request to mitigate processing resources consumption.