basically the TLDR of http://chriskiehl.com/article/parallelism-in-one-line/

parallel_scripting.py

#!/usr/bin/python

from multiprocessing.dummy import Pool as ThreadPool

# arbitrary. could base this on the number of cores
PARALLELISM = 5

pool  = ThreadPool(PARALLELISM)

def function_to_apply(item):
    # do things with item
    raise NotImplementedError()

things_to_process = list()

results = pool.map(function_to_apply, things_to_process)


pool.close()
pool.join()