The PowerCenter Integration Service process performs read, transformation, and write processing for a pipeline in parallel. It can process multiple partitions of a pipeline within a session, and it can process multiple sessions in parallel.

If you have a symmetric multi-processing (SMP) platform, you can use multiple CPUs to concurrently process session data or partitions of data. This provides increased performance, as true parallelism is achieved. On a single processor platform, these tasks share the CPU, so there is no parallelism.

The PowerCenter Integration Service process can use multiple CPUs to process a session that contains multiple partitions. The number of CPUs used depends on factors such as the number of partitions, the number of threads, the number of available CPUs, and amount or resources required to process the mapping.