Is SAP HANA a database or an OS ?

I was going through the SAP HANA development guide, trying to understand the basics like why HANA, how it is different from existing database softwares.

It is claimed that SAP HANA could support parallel processing and below is the sentence supporting the claim:

"If multiple columns need to be searched or aggregated, each of these operations can be assigned to a different processor core"

Is it possible for a database to assign operations to the cores of processor or did I understand the meaning of the above sentence in a wrong way.