http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/parallel

GNU parallel is a shell tool for executing jobs in parallel. A job is typically a single command or a small script that has to be run for each of the lines in the input. The typical input is a list of files, a list of hosts, a list of users, or a list of tables.

Here are the shellscripts of http://mdm.berlios.de/usage.html ported to parallel use:

seq 1 19 | parallel -j+0 buffon -o - | sort -n >* result* cat files | parallel -j+0 cmd

In RPM of moreutils on Fedora 12 is another parallel. It is not GNU Parallel but instead a program with less features.

middleman(mdm) is also a tool for running jobs in parallel.

http://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/man.html#differences_between_mdm_middleman_and_gnu_parallel

See also xjobs http://www.maier-komor.de/xjobs.html

xjobs reads job descriptions line by line and executes them in parallel. It limits the number of parallel executing jobs and starts new jobs when jobs finish. If no utility is given as an argument to xjobs, then the first argument on every job line will be used as utility. xjobs support I/O redirection, which makes some applications possible that cannot be done with GNU’s xargs. xjobs also determines the number of processors automatically, whereas xargs must be told how many processes to start.

http://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/man.html#differences_between_xjobs_and_gnu_parallel