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