Parallel

Run independent programs in parallel

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.

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:

github: seehuhn/parallel

Version	Date	Download	Notes
0.9	2009-12-14	tar.gz (92 KB), sig, sha1 `3859323dc5f8923bc02008ff47c2289636354f60`

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.