A good simple way to start with parallel processing in python is just the pool mapping in mutiprocessing — its like the usual python maps but individual function calls are spread out over the different number of processes.
Factoring is a nice example of this – you can brute-force check all the divisions spreading out over all available tasks:
from multiprocessing import Pool
import numpy
numToFactor = 976
def isFactor(x):
result = None
div = (numToFactor / x)
if div*x == numToFactor:
result = (x,div)
return result
if __name__ == '__main__':
pool = Pool(processes=4)
possibleFactors = range(1,int(numpy.floor(numpy.sqrt(numToFactor)))+1)
print 'Checking ', possibleFactors
result = pool.map(isFactor, possibleFactors)
cleaned = [x for x in result if not x is None]
print 'Factors are', cleaned
This gives me
Checking [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31]
Factors are [(1, 976), (2, 488), (4, 244), (8, 122), (16, 61)]