Arcpy Parallel Processing Environment

Question

I recently discovered the Parallel Processing environment setting in ArcGIS (this must be new to 10.1), however, there is no mention as to what tools are designed to utilize this environment setting. ESRI provides one example of how to set the parallel processing environment:

import arcpy

# Use half of the cores on the machine.
arcpy.env.parallelProcessingFactor = "50%" 

My questions are very closely related, so I am including them in the same thread:

1. Which geoprocessing tools honor the parallel processing environment?
2. Are these local or global settings (i.e. can you set the environment at the beginning of the Arcpy script and all respective tools will honor the environment setting thereafter?
3. Are most geoprocessing tools already set to: arcpy.env.parallelProcessingFactor = "100%"by default?

Answer 1

New at 10.1 SP1, from what I can find.

This is not a complete answer, but a quick search of fixed "bugs" revealed references to mosaic datasets and geostatistical analyst tools. The latter has a topic about it. Note: although it appears that this topic is not directly related to the parallel processing factor.

Edit for clarification: Many geostatistical tools now support parallel processing but do not appear to support the "parallel processing factor" that's available for certain other tools in geoprocessing.

A tool reference should list "parallel processing factor" in the environments section if the setting is supported. The tile cache toolset appears to support the factor too.