<i>"Unlike xargs however, Parallel lets me make use of the many cores that I have access to [...]"</i><p><i>Unlike</i> xargs? That's just plain wrong, see xargs' -P flag.
Oh man ! I wish someone had told me this before. Back when i did research for my BSc thesis, I had an 24 core machine and wrote a script to create 24 bash scripts to split up my task which i would than run in parallel.<p>Sometimes I have the felling that I am wasting time when I check HN too often, but stuff like this makes me think otherwise.
Previous discussion on GNU parallel:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1801186" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1801186</a>