Hardware wise there are 3 types of parallel processing systems available: 1. SMP (symetric multiprocessing: multiple CPUs shared memory single OS) 2. MPP (Massively Parallel Processing Systems: multiple CPUs each having a personal set of resources - memory OS etc but physically housed on the same machine) 3. Clusters: same as MPP but physically dispersed (not on the same box & connected via high speed networks).
DS offers 2 types of parallelism to take advantage of the above hardware: 1. Pipeline Parallelism 2. Partition Parallelism