[Chicago] Parallelism, or Chris is a big thinker

[Chris McAvoy]

Remember yesterday when we were all talking about concurrency and
stuff?  I guess a bunch of big thinkers were too:

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/06/googles_folding.html

I ended up solving my teeny tiny concurrency problem by opening up two
ipython sessions and running my jobs in batches.  It was cheap, but it
sped up my job by *2, and I got to see my dual core machine go to 100%
rather than 50%.

Next week I'll show anyone that's interested.  It really bugged me the
first time I opened up my mac processor monitor thingee and saw Python
100% CPU, but my actual CPU at 50%.  Rather than get into fork, I took
the cheap way by running in batches...but hey...cheap works.

Chris