Question

I am running a task in pseudo-distributed mode on my 4 core laptop. How can I ensure that all cores are effectively used.
Currently my job tracker shows that only one job is executing at a time. Does that mean only one core is used?

The following are my configuration files.

conf/core-site.xml:

<configuration>
   <property>
       <name>fs.default.name</name>
       <value>hdfs://localhost:9000</value>
   </property>
 </configuration>

conf/hdfs-site.xml:

<configuration>
  <property>
       <name>dfs.replication</name>
       <value>1</value>
  </property>
</configuration>

conf/mapred-site.xml:

<configuration>
   <property>
        <name>mapred.job.tracker</name>
        <value>localhost:9001</value>  
   </property>

</configuration>

EDIT:
As per the answer, I need to add the following properties in mapred-site.xml

 <property>
     <name>mapred.map.tasks</name> 
     <value>4</value> 
  </property>
  <property>
     <name>mapred.reduce.tasks</name> 
     <value>4</value> 
  </property>

Answer 1

mapred.map.tasks and mapred.reduce.tasks will control this, and (I believe) would be set in mapred-site.xml. However this establishes these as cluster-wide defaults; more usually you would configure these on a per-job basis. You can set the same params on the java command line with -D