How to control many tiny lights I've been modeling in blender for several years now, but only recently started doing some animation.

This thing I'm currently working on requires controlling hundreds of little lights turning off and on. If I was just doing a couple, I'd merely animate the emission materials as needed. But for something of this scale, having tons of individually animated materials seems rather impractical. They also need to be animated in patterns, which depending on the solution could make it harder or easier.

This is a rough example of what I'm going for in terms of shape and number


Thus far, my attempts at google have resulted in nothing, and so I turn to the ever helpful boards. If any more experienced animators had any tips or recommendations, that would be lovely.

I'm working in Cycles if that matters.

Thanks!
The basic principle is the same as this: 

https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/39509/1853

Where you have an array of light bulbs.



An empty in the scene to control the size and placement of the texture.
And a texture to control the strength of an emission shader:



Animating the texture mapping of the texture you can make the lightbulbs make any pattern: