A special-purpose processing system, a method of carrying out sharing special-purpose processing resources and a graphics processing system. In one embodiment, the special-purpose processing system includes: (1) a special-purpose processing resource and (2) a Representational State Transfer (ReST) application programming interface operable to process data using the special-purpose processing resource in response to stateless commands based on a standard protocol selected from the group consisting of: (2a) a standard network protocol and (2b) a standard database query protocol.