Multiprocessing for a small set of things all simultaneous

parmap.py

# via here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5442910/python-multiprocessing-pool-map-for-multiple-arguments
from multiprocessing import Process, Pipe
from itertools import izip

def spawn(f):
    def fun(pipe,x):
        pipe.send(f(x))
        pipe.close()
    return fun

def parmap(f,X):
    pipe=[Pipe() for x in X]
    proc=[Process(target=spawn(f),args=(c,x)) for x,(p,c) in izip(X,pipe)]
    [p.start() for p in proc]
    [p.join() for p in proc]
    return [p.recv() for (p,c) in pipe]