Better utilization of duo-core?

[John Henry]

Hi list,

I have a Python ap that starts another non-Pythoon ap for number
crunching.  My new notebook comes with a duo-core CPU.  I tried
manually running 2 copies of my ap at the same time) and it appears to
run the whole job faster (or at least the CPU loading level as show by
the task manager appears so).  So, I want my Python code to do this
automatically.

How do I detect whether I have additional CPUs in the system?  The
google search turns up answer about a Sun workstation but not Windows
XP.

Thanks,