For the main computation of smoothed particle hydrodynamics was finite nearest particle search, a novel scheme to parallelize the smoothed particle hydrodynamics method based on the concept of particle decomposition was proposed. Any serial smoothed particle hydrodynamics code could be easily parallelized by using the proposed scheme. The amount of information, which was transformed in each time step, depended only on the total number of particles, but not on the spatial distribution of particles. Therefore, the proposed scheme was particularly useful for the parallel simulation of cases involved violent free surface movements. From the simulation results of a 3D dam break case with a total number of 0.4 million, the proposed scheme can achieve a speedup ratio about 16, which proves that the proposed scheme maybe is better than the domain decomposition scheme(without considering dynamic load balance).