Parallel
By Jochen Voss, last updated .
Contents
Introduction
Most modern desktop machines have considerable computing power, provided by one or more multi-core CPUs. Parallel, the program described on this page, provides a simple way to use this parallelism in the case where just a number of independent programs needs to be run. Parallel has the following features:
- Parallel reads a list of commands from a file,
- it starts as many of these commands as there are CPU cores in the system, and
- as soon as one of the jobs finishes it starts a new command from the list until all jobs are processed.
![[jobs]](/image/jobs-0600.png)
Figure 1. This is an example of how 12 jobs could be scheduled over 3 cpus.
Download
Parallel is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. The source code is available for download here:
- parallel version 0.9, 2009-12-14
This is the first public release of parallel.
- archive: parallel-0.9.tar.gz (92KB)
signature: parallel-0.9.tar.gz.asc
sha1: 3859323dc5f8923bc02008ff47c2289636354f60
md5: ab4f03a89a8b25f49ac5c0dc4f2345cd
- archive: parallel-0.9.tar.gz (92KB)
Documentation is in the file README in the source archive and also in the included manual page. Please send any comments, bug reports, etc. to Jochen Voss.