Running shell script in parallel

Another very handy way to do this is with gnu parallel, which is well worth installing if you don't already have it; this is invaluable if the tasks don't necessarily take the same amount of time.

seq 1000 | parallel -j 8 --workdir $PWD ./myrun {}

will launch ./myrun 1, ./myrun 2, etc, making sure 8 jobs at a time are running. It can also take lists of nodes if you want to run on several nodes at once, eg in a PBS job; our instructions to our users for how to do that on our system are here.

Updated to add: You want to make sure you're using gnu-parallel, not the more limited utility of the same name that comes in the moreutils package (the divergent history of the two is described here.)

Check out bash subshells, these can be used to run parts of a script in parallel.

I haven't tested this, but this could be a start:

#!/bin/bash
for i in $(seq 1 1000)
do
   ( Generating random numbers here , sorting  and outputting to file$i.txt ) &
   if (( $i % 10 == 0 )); then wait; fi # Limit to 10 concurrent subshells.
done
wait

To make things run in parallel you use '&' at the end of a shell command to run it in the background, then wait will by default (i.e. without arguments) wait until all background processes are finished. So, maybe kick off 10 in parallel, then wait, then do another ten. You can do this easily with two nested loops.

There is a whole list of programs that can run jobs in parallel from a shell, which even includes comparisons between them, in the documentation for GNU parallel. There are many, many solutions out there. Another good news is that they are probably quite efficient at scheduling jobs so that all the cores/processors are kept busy at all times.

There is a simple, portable program that does just this for you: PPSS. PPSS automatically schedules jobs for you, by checking how many cores are available and launching another job every time another one just finished.