High Performance Computing is not the exclusive domain of computational science. Instead, high computational power is required in many devices, which are not built with the primary goal of providing their users with a computer of any kind, but to offer a service in which a powerful computer plays a central role. Medical imaging is an example of the application of such a High Performance Embedded System. As signals from an X-ray or magneto-resonance device come in at a very high rate, they are processed by a computer to provide the radiologist with a visualization suitable for further diagnosis. Other examples include radar and sonar processing, speech synthesis and recognition, and a broad range of applications in the fields of multimedia and telecommunications.