On Thu, Apr 05, 2012 at 09:47:45AM -0700, Wil Irwin wrote:
> 
> ... Submitting a job in each terminal window will send it to a core which is not being used.
>

I sense a deep conceptual misunderstanding.

In traditional time shared multiprocessing systems, such as Linux or WinNT,
you do not "send a job to a core". You start a process that contains
your job, then the system CPU scheduler will run this process
on any and all CPUs ("cores" in "your speak") available. Additionally,
there is no such thing as "core that is not being used". Normally all CPUs
are active - running user jobs, handling network traffic, etc.

That said, on some systems, you can "glue" a process to a particular CPU
using special system CPU scheduler commands. This may or may not result
in improved performance due to complicated interactions between your computations,
the CPU data caches and the main memory.

(More modern system complicate things by trying to reduce power use
by reducing CPU frequency and/or powering down CPU cores. But in the
normal case of using your computer to compute, all CPU cores
will be powered and running at maximum frequency. Anyhow, powered down
CPU cores come back quickly enough that for the purpose of running
any non-trivial computations, one can ignore these effects and consider
all CPUs being available to run jobs at all the times).

-- 
Konstantin Olchanski
Data Acquisition Systems: The Bytes Must Flow!
Email: olchansk-at-triumf-dot-ca
Snail mail: 4004 Wesbrook Mall, TRIUMF, Vancouver, B.C., V6T 2A3, Canada