Running shell script in parallel

Question

I have a shell script which

1. shuffles a large text file (6 million rows and 6 columns)
2. sorts the file based the first column
3. outputs 1000 fi

Answer 1

There is a whole list of programs that can run jobs in parallel from a shell, which even includes comparisons between them, in the documentation for GNU parallel. There are many, many solutions out there. Another good news is that they are probably quite efficient at scheduling jobs so that all the cores/processors are kept busy at all times.