The means of achieving parallel processing architecture is through SIMD, MIMD and SIMD. The architecture should have pipelining facility. There are additional pipelining features in RISC and CISC. Cache mechanism is also deployed in parallel processing architectures. The vast computation is forcing systems to be fault tolerant. Fault tolerance has specific reference to time critical applications, life critical applications, and finance critical applications using computer systems. Examples include flight control, reactor control, online transaction processing etc.

---