One embodiment of the present invention sets forth a technique for encapsulating compute task state that enables out-of-order scheduling and execution of the compute tasks. The scheduling circuitry organizes the compute tasks into groups based on priority levels. The compute tasks may then be selected for execution using different scheduling schemes. Each group is maintained as a linked list of pointers to compute tasks that are encoded as task metadata (TMD) stored in memory. A TMD encapsulates the state and parameters needed to initialize, schedule, and execute a compute task.