1. An automated method to allocate resources of a highly parallel computing system for processing a database query, the method comprising: receiving the database query from an application at a client system; compiling the query and computing the number of executive server processes (ESPs) in each ESP layer of the query; generating an affinity value, wherein the affinity value specifies a subset of processors for a range of processor subset sizes; executing the query wherein placement of ESP layers of the query onto processors of the computing system is determined using the affinity value; and returning results of the execution to the application.