How to spawn parallel child processes on a multi-processor system?

What you are looking for is the process pool class in multiprocessing.

import multiprocessing
import subprocess

def work(cmd):
    return subprocess.call(cmd, shell=False)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    count = multiprocessing.cpu_count()
    pool = multiprocessing.Pool(processes=count)
    print pool.map(work, ['ls'] * count)

And here is a calculation example to make it easier to understand. The following will divide 10000 tasks on N processes where N is the cpu count. Note that I’m passing None as the number of processes. This will cause the Pool class to use cpu_count for the number of processes (reference)

import multiprocessing
import subprocess

def calculate(value):
    return value * 10

if __name__ == '__main__':
    pool = multiprocessing.Pool(None)
    tasks = range(10000)
    results = []
    r = pool.map_async(calculate, tasks, callback=results.append)
    r.wait() # Wait on the results
    print results