Parallel launches each command j times

[conahorse]

Hi everyone,
I'd like to have parallel lunch at most N commands in parallel on my machine. I have a file where each line corresponds to a command, named commands.exp.
What I do is simply this:

paralle -j N < commands.exp

(where N is 8, but nevermind)
but I have is that on my netbook I seem to have the first 8 lines running in parallel, but on my other machine (having the same version of parallel and os, namely ubuntu 14.04 parallel@gnu.org), the first 8 lines get 8 processes each! Thus creating a huge bottleneck.
What am I missing here? Why does parallel consider each line to be launched 8 times?

Thanks in andance