Nested paging is a hardware solution for alleviating the software memory management overhead imposed by system virtualization. Nested paging complements existing page walk hardware to form a two-dimensional (2D) page walk, which reduces the need for hypervisor intervention in guest page table management. However, the extra dimension also increases the maximum number of architecturally-required page table references.

Media applications, such as image processing, signal processing, video, and graphics, require high computation rates and data bandwidths. The stream programming model is a natural and powerful way to describe these applications. Expressing media applications in this model allows hardware and software systems to take advantage of their concurrency and locality in order to meet their high computational demands. The Imagine stream programming system, a set of software tools and algorithms, is used to program media applications in the stream programming model. We achieve real-time performance on a variety of media processing applications with high computation rates (4-15 billion achieved operations per second) and high efficiency (84-95% occupancy on the arithmetic clusters).

We describe a hardware and software platform for developing streaming applications. Programmers write stream programs in high-level languages, and a set of software tools maps these programs to code that runs on a streaming hardware system. The hardware platform includes two Imagine stream processors, together providing 32 GFLOPS peak performance, and a high-speed onboard network to carry video and other data between peripherals and the Imagine processors.