We introduce the Resource Aware Programming framework, which allows users to monitor the resources used by their programs and to programmatically express policies for the management of such resources. The framework is based on a notion of hierarchical groups, which act as resource containers for the computations they sponsor. Asynchronous notifications for resource exhaustion and for computation termination can be handled by arbitrary user code, which is also executed under the control of this hierarchical group structure. Resources are manipulated by the programmer using resource descriptors, whose operations are specified by a resource algebra. In this article, we overview the Resource Aware Programming framework and describe its semantics in the form of a language-independent abstract machine able to model both shared and distributed memory environments. Finally, we discuss a prototype implementation of the Resource Aware Programming framework in Java.