Understanding a grid algorithm for 2D multiplayer game which distributes workload to multi-core CPU

I've come across a multiplayer game framework https://github.com/jondubois/iogrid and it features an algorithm to efficiently handle the movement and collisions of multiple players on a huge map. What it tries to do is to divide the map into smaller cells and create child processes (because it is single thread in javascript) for those cells. Then the algorithm distributes the game workload to different processes of the CPU. So basically each cell will be handled by a child process but everyone of them will share the same game context. This way if I use a 4 core or 8 core CPU I can use all the cores of the CPU by creating new workers processes. And supposedly it will reduce the burden of the master process. In C++ or Java we may choose to create new threads but in javascript there is only one thread in the code so creating processes is very similar. However, I am not familiar with the algorithm. I am not very sure if this is a standard way or a better way to deal with the multiplayer game scenario. But by looking at the way it describes this should be more efficient than using a single core to run the game server on a modern computer. I guess if this is the case there must be some kind of algorithm using by the game development community that does the same thing. What is the name of this algorithm and how can I find articles/materials about it? At the moment I find it hard to understand the algorithm. Particularly in how to deal with the cell overlapping and avoid duplicate calculations when players frequently moving between two adjacent cells. I hope this is not too programming language specific because we all need to deal with multi-core CPU and distribute the workload to improve game performance at some point.