Teradata developers designed Teradata Database from mostly off-the-shelf hardware components. The result was an inexpensive, high-quality system that exceeded the performance of conventional relational database management systems. The hardware components of Teradata Database evolved from those of a simple parallel database computer into those of a general-purpose, massively parallel computer running the database.
The architecture supports both single-node, Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) systems and multinode, Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) systems in which the distributed functions communicate by means of a fast interconnect structure. The interconnect structure is the BYNET for MPP systems and the boardless BYNET for SMP systems.