Monday, October 04, 2010

A Poor Man's Parallel Processing

A very crude, but often good enough, method to achieve parallel processing (e.g., on multi-core computers) is to partition the large input data file into small chunks, run the program to process each of them in parallel, and then merge the output results file back. Fortunately, this process can be done easily with the wise iterative usage of two Unix utilities: split and cat.