Various approaches for deploying and controlling distributed accelerated compute operations with the use of infrastructure processing units (IPUs) and similar networked processing units are disclosed. A system for orchestrating acceleration functions in a network compute mesh is configured to access a flowgraph, the flowgraph including data producer-consumer relationships between a plurality of tasks in a workload; identify available artifacts and resources to execute the artifacts to complete each of the plurality of tasks, wherein an artifact is an instance of a function to perform a task of the plurality of tasks; determine a configuration assigning artifacts and resources to each of the plurality of tasks in the flowgraph; and schedule, based on the configuration, the plurality of tasks to execute using the assigned artifacts and resources.