1. A method for providing heterogeneous resources for client systems, comprising: maintaining a stateful resource database that tracks a set of heterogeneous hardware and software resources available for a given environment, wherein the set of heterogeneous hardware and software resources comprises scarce, specialized, machine-specific hardware and software resources that are configured to automatically accept and execute operations requested by client systems in the given environment, and wherein the stateful resource database facilitates managing the efficient operation and sharing of these scarce hardware and software resources; receiving a request from a client system; searching for a heterogeneous resource in the stateful resource database in response to the request; matching an available heterogeneous resource in the stateful resource database with the request; and submitting the request to the available heterogeneous resource, which then executes the request; whereby maintaining and using the stateful resource database facilitates efficiently sharing scarce heterogeneous resources across a set of client systems.