One of the highlights of real time simulation refers to its special computation parallelism capability, in which different components of the model could be simulated through assigning to different calculation cores. The incorporating calculation cores for simulating the model can be any of the following combinations: several cores of the same CPU, several CPUs of the same computer (calculation machine), computational cores of different computers in a local area interconnecting via Local Area Network (LAN), several computers distributed in distant geographic locations communicating through Wide Area Network (WAN).

In real time simulation parallelism, the digital simulator performs parallel computation with multiple input/outputs allowing it to be connected to and control external hardware and equipment directly from the simulation. The processors are also different from those used in offline parallel computing: they are programmed for specific tasks of real time simulation (programmed FPGA in Opal-RT products, or programmed PB5 for RTDS machines).