1. A method for designing a hardware configuration of an artificial neural network, the method comprising: receiving information relating to hardware resources available for at least one hardware device; receiving a desired network topology; determining a plurality of degrees of parallelism for the desired network topology; for each degree of parallelism of the plurality of degrees of parallelism estimating at least one of: a hardware resource estimate to implement the network topology with the degree of parallelism; and a performance estimate for the network topology with the degree of parallelism; selecting a degree of parallelism based on the hardware resources available and at least one of the hardware resource estimates and the performance estimates; and generating a hardware configuration based on the degree of parallelism simultaneously across a plurality of levels of hardware parallelism.