Are resource demanding process divided into multiple processes?

It is spotted on google cloud engine. Multiple instances of my script are created (by bash?). The reason might be that the script demands very high amount of memory. How is this division done exactly? Any performance impact?

[UPDATE] My mistake. These instances are threads created by python.

Answer

Don’t overestimate the skills of the Python. Python is incapable to do even a multi-threaded process model, automatically dividing tasks into parallel executable sub-tasks is far over its limits.

This process is divided into sub-processes because it was written on this way.

The feature what you are estimating – automatically parallelize processes – is practically unsolvable in the general case, although it is still a hot Computer Science research topic.