This can be done very elegantly with Ray.

To parallelize your example, you'd need to define your functions with the @ray.remote decorator, and then invoke them with .remote.

import ray

ray.init()

# Define the functions.

@ray.remote
def solve1(a):
    return 1

@ray.remote
def solve2(b):
    return 2

# Start two tasks in the background.
x_id = solve1.remote(0)
y_id = solve2.remote(1)

# Block until the tasks are done and get the results.
x, y = ray.get([x_id, y_id])

There are a number of advantages of this over the multiprocessing module.

1. The same code will run on a multicore machine as well as a cluster of machines.

2. Processes share data efficiently through shared memory and zero-copy serialization.

3. Error messages are propagated nicely.

4. These function calls can be composed together, e.g.,

    @ray.remote
    def f(x):
        return x + 1
   
    x_id = f.remote(1)
    y_id = f.remote(x_id)
    z_id = f.remote(y_id)
    ray.get(z_id)  # returns 4
   

5. In addition to invoking functions remotely, classes can be instantiated remotely as actors.

Note that Ray is a framework I've been helping develop.

from joblib import Parallel, delayed
def process(i):
    return i * i
    
results = Parallel(n_jobs=2)(delayed(process)(i) for i in range(10))
print(results)  # prints [0, 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81]

The above works beautifully on my machine (Ubuntu, package joblib was pre-installed, but can be installed via pip install joblib).

Taken from https://blog.dominodatalab.com/simple-parallelization/

Edit on Mar 31, 2021: On joblib, multiprocessing, threading and asyncio

• joblib in the above code uses import multiprocessing under the hood (and thus multiple processes, which is typically the best way to run CPU work across cores - because of the GIL)
• You can let joblib use multiple threads instead of multiple processes, but this (or using import threading directly) is only beneficial if the threads spend considerable time on I/O (e.g. read/write to disk, send an HTTP request). For I/O work, the GIL does not block the execution of another thread
• Since Python 3.7, as an alternative to threading, you can parallelise work with asyncio, but the same advice applies like for import threading (though in contrast to latter, only 1 thread will be used; on the plus side, asyncio has a lot of nice features which are helpful for async programming)
• Using multiple processes incurs overhead. Think about it: Typically, each process needs to initialise/load everything you need to run your calculation. You need to check yourself if the above code snippet improves your wall time. Here is another one, for which I confirmed that joblib produces better results:

import time
from joblib import Parallel, delayed

def countdown(n):
    while n>0:
        n -= 1
    return n


t = time.time()
for _ in range(20):
    print(countdown(10**7), end=" ")
print(time.time() - t)  
# takes ~10.5 seconds on medium sized Macbook Pro


t = time.time()
results = Parallel(n_jobs=2)(delayed(countdown)(10**7) for _ in range(20))
print(results)
print(time.time() - t)
# takes ~6.3 seconds on medium sized Macbook Pro