Ubuntu :: Limiting # Of Threads Launched By A Script

I have a script that basically takes a list of IP addresses, and pings them to tell me if each device (Access Point) is online or not. The problem with that is, the list contains about a hundred addresses. Making the problem worse is the fact that using a single ICMP packet per device is not an option since, at certain times of the day, the network is too congested to guarantee that a single ICMP packet won't be dropped, despite the device being up and running. That means I need to send multiple pings per device for about a hundred devices. As you can imagine, doing this sequentially takes a while.

What I want to do is make my script open other threads in the background to ping multiple devices in parallel. The problem with that is - if I simply make each ping command run in parallel, soon there are a hundred background tasks, one for each address, and that consumes a lot of CPU (CPU hits 100% and stays there till the script is done). Is there a way I can make about 10 threads run at a time, and any other threads will queue until a spot opens up for them? Kind of like the token bucket, except when there aren't enough tokens, the main script waits until it can launch more background threads that ping the next addresses on the list.