diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index ab500587..30d1b9f9 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -204,7 +204,7 @@ Compared to ChatGLM's [P-Tuning](https://github.com/THUDM/ChatGLM2-6B/tree/main/
 
 [23/08/11] We supported **[DPO training](https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18290)** for instruction-tuned models. See [examples](examples/README.md) for usage.
 
-[23/07/31] We supported **dataset streaming**. Try `streaming: true` and `max_steps: 10000` arguments to load your dataset in streaming mode.
+[23/07/31] We supported **dataset streaming**. Try `streaming: true` and `max_steps: 10000` arguments to load your dataset in streaming mode. Use `dataset_shards` to enable parallel preprocessing with streaming.
 
 [23/07/29] We released two instruction-tuned 13B models at Hugging Face. See these Hugging Face Repos ([LLaMA-2](https://huggingface.co/hiyouga/Llama-2-Chinese-13b-chat) / [Baichuan](https://huggingface.co/hiyouga/Baichuan-13B-sft)) for details.
 
diff --git a/README_zh.md b/README_zh.md
index 4862060e..d6643906 100644
--- a/README_zh.md
+++ b/README_zh.md
@@ -206,7 +206,7 @@ https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/43b700c6-a178-41db-b1f8-8190a5d3fcfc
 
 [23/08/11] 我们支持了指令模型的 **[DPO 训练](https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18290)**。详细用法请参照 [examples](examples/README_zh.md)。
 
-[23/07/31] 我们支持了**数据流式加载**。请使用 `streaming: true` 和 `max_steps: 10000` 参数来流式加载数据集。
+[23/07/31] 我们支持了**数据流式加载**。请使用 `streaming: true` 和 `max_steps: 10000` 参数来流式加载数据集。 用 `dataset_shards` 来开启多进程加载。
 
 [23/07/29] 我们在 Hugging Face 发布了两个 13B 指令微调模型。详细内容请查阅我们的 Hugging Face 项目（[LLaMA-2](https://huggingface.co/hiyouga/Llama-2-Chinese-13b-chat) / [Baichuan](https://huggingface.co/hiyouga/Baichuan-13B-sft)）。
 
diff --git a/src/llamafactory/data/loader.py b/src/llamafactory/data/loader.py
index e495cc31..78fa1192 100644
--- a/src/llamafactory/data/loader.py
+++ b/src/llamafactory/data/loader.py
@@ -101,10 +101,12 @@ def _load_single_dataset(
             split=dataset_attr.split,
             cache_dir=cache_dir,
             token=model_args.ms_hub_token,
-            use_streaming=data_args.streaming,
+            use_streaming=data_args.streaming and not data_args.dataset_shards,  # only set to True when user specified streaming but do not want dataset to be sharded
         )
         if isinstance(dataset, MsDataset):
             dataset = dataset.to_hf_dataset()
+        if data_args.streaming and data_args.dataset_shards:
+            dataset = dataset.to_iterable_dataset(num_shards=data_args.dataset_shards)
 
     elif dataset_attr.load_from == "om_hub":
         check_version("openmind>=0.8.0", mandatory=True)
@@ -131,10 +133,12 @@ def _load_single_dataset(
             split=dataset_attr.split,
             cache_dir=model_args.cache_dir,
             token=model_args.hf_hub_token,
-            streaming=data_args.streaming,
             num_proc=data_args.preprocessing_num_workers,
             trust_remote_code=model_args.trust_remote_code,
+            streaming=data_args.streaming and not data_args.dataset_shards,
         )
+        if data_args.streaming and data_args.dataset_shards:
+            dataset = dataset.to_iterable_dataset(num_shards=data_args.dataset_shards)
 
     if dataset_attr.num_samples is not None and not data_args.streaming:
         target_num = dataset_attr.num_samples
diff --git a/src/llamafactory/hparams/data_args.py b/src/llamafactory/hparams/data_args.py
index 3a66b2c0..3a51142b 100644
--- a/src/llamafactory/hparams/data_args.py
+++ b/src/llamafactory/hparams/data_args.py
@@ -83,6 +83,10 @@ class DataArguments:
         default=None,
         metadata={"help": "The number of processes to use for the pre-processing."},
     )
+    dataset_shards: Optional[int] = field(
+        default=None,
+        metadata={"help": "The number of shards to split the dataset into. Only used in streaming mode. This should be set to the same as dataloader_num_workers. Not setting this while streaming data will cause the dataset to be non-sharded and thus only can be processed using one worker."},
+    )
     max_samples: Optional[int] = field(
         default=None,
         metadata={"help": "For debugging purposes, truncate the number of examples for each dataset."},