Pipeline

A pipeline is a system of connected pipes that transports liquids, gases, or slurries from a source to a destination. In engineering and infrastructure, pipelines form networks that move products such as oil, natural gas, water, and chemical feedstocks across long distances, often spanning countries and continents. The design focuses on flow capacity, pressure management, material compatibility, and safety. The term pipeline also appears in computing and information technology to describe a sequence of processing stages through which data passes.

Physical pipelines consist of pipes, valves, pumps or compressors, meters, and control systems. They are laid underground or above ground and require materials such as steel, plastic, or concrete-coated pipelines. Maintenance includes inspection for corrosion, welding integrity, leakage detection, and cathodic protection. Environmental and safety considerations include risk of spills, explosions, and methane emissions, leading to regulatory standards and monitoring. Pipelines may traverse challenging terrains and require routing studies, right-of-way agreements, and emergency response plans.

In data processing, a pipeline is a chain of processing stages that transform and move data from source systems to target destinations. Common forms include ETL pipelines that extract, transform, and load data; streaming pipelines that process events in real time; and machine learning pipelines that prepare data, train models, and deploy predictions. Pipelines emphasize modularity, error handling, retries, and observability.

In computer architecture, instruction pipelines split instruction execution into sequential stages (fetch, decode, execute, memory access, writeback) to improve throughput. Pipelining can introduce hazards such as data dependencies or branch misprediction, which are mitigated by techniques like stalls, forwarding, or branch prediction. The concept also appears in software tools, such as shell pipelines that connect programs with streams, enabling data to flow from one process to another.