Processors and disks have access to a common memory, typically via a bus or through an interconnection network.
Extremely efficient communication between processors — data in shared memory can be accessed by any processor without having to move it using software.
Downside – architecture is not scalable beyond 32 or 64 processors since the bus or the interconnection network becomes a bottleneck
Widely used for lower degrees of parallelism (4 to 8).