I want to design FIR and IIR Filters...

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for FIR

low-pass filter, order 55, with a cutoff at 10 hz, 500 samples/second

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As Dave explained, a low speed filter like this can be easily implemented serially. A different point is, that the filter specification doesn't make much sense for a high-order FIR filter. The problem is, that "order 55" doesn't represent more than a single cycle at the 10 Hz cut-off. This implies, that the filter coefficients don't give much freedom of tuning the filter shape around the cut-off frequency, which would usually be the purpose of a FIR filter. I expect, that a low order IIR filter gives similar performance in this case. You should try yourself with a filter software tool.