Various approaches for deploying and controlling distributed compute operations with the use of infrastructure processing units (IPUs) and similar networked processing units are disclosed. A system that includes a networked processing unit may perform workload processing with operations that: receive, from another networked processing unit, workload information for a workload, for a workload having respective tasks to be processed among distributed computing entities; perform an analysis of network conditions for a predicted execution of the workload, based on the workload information, to analyze network availability among the distributed computing entities; perform an analysis of compute conditions for the predicted execution of the workload, based on the workload information, to analyze processing availability among the distributed computing entities; and identify locations of the distributed computing entities to deploy the workload, based on the analysis of network conditions and the analysis of compute conditions.