Hi Joseph,
There are two scenarios to partitioning a table. One is across several nodes in a cluster and the other is partitioning the table within one node. The former is normally referred to as a 'distributed table' (i.e. the table is distributed across several nodes).
You can partition the table within a single node for several reasons such as overcoming the 2B limit on the table entries, or for partitioning the table based on some criteria that improves the query performance in some cases.
When creating the table, there are several partitioning parameters available which you can see in the SAP HANA SQL Reference documentation available here: http://help.sap.com/hana_platform
Hope this helps
-Vivek