I think I need to elaborate a bit more...... or perhaps parallel processing is the wrong name for what I want to do.
The applications actually has 3 main components: Build historical data,
Forecast, Build Forecasted data (which we write to an Oracale and Teradata database)
The Build step could actually be thought of as 6 separate jobs (which build 23 data sets) and the forecast step could actually be broken into 23 jobs (23 Forecast Studio Projects which are updated monthly with new data). The last step writes the forecasts out to Oracle/Teradata and is only run after we validate the Forecasts.
We are running on a server with 4 cores with hyperthreading. Theoretically, we could have 8 jobs running simultaneously. We have done testing and we don't see a lot of performance issues. Currently the build step takes 2-3 hours. By running, simultaneously, we can cut it to a little over an hour (The longest any one build takes). Similiarly, we can cut out a substantial amout of the forecasting step by running several steps simultaneously (Probably at least an hour).
This application has been running for 3 years as a single job - with the primary complaint that it takes too long. What I want to do is allow the user to continue to submit the job (as a single job) and have the code take care of running the different parts simultaneously. In essence, this is the same as using separate jobs.