It's load balanced farm.

Then you are going to have to either: a)limit the number of processes you run to match the number of cpu's you are allowed; or b) ask the operations/support people for that system if there is an API available for your purpose.

In a single cpu, multicore system; any processes can and will be scheduled to run on the next available processor and it may run on a different processor for each timeslice. This is entirely transparent to the user-level code and it makes it pretty much impossible for application code to measure which and how many cores it is using at any given time. The solution to the problem on these types of system is to use an OS api that sets a mask for those cpus this process (or thread) is allowed to be scheduled to. On windows this is SetProcessAffinityMask(); there is probably a similar api available on modern versions of *nix, though I don't think it is a part of the POSIX spec.

But, on a processor farm, the OS itself doesn't manage the allocation of processes to cpus, and each of those CPUs probably have multiple cores; so you'll need an API provided by the load-balancer to provide you with the control you need.