The availability of powerful field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) has been exploited for their ability to rovide hardware solutions for many application areas, resulting in high-performance systems that can operate in real time by operating in parallel. The support vector machine computational paradigm can be cast as a collection of multiple streams operating in parallel on one such FPGA. This paper presents a parallel architecture that implements an SVM on a Xilinx FPGA. The results obtained by using this architecture for a complex pattern classification from high-energy physics involving thousands of patterns are reported and discussed, comparing the performance obtained by this architectural solution to that of a simpler sequential architecture.