1. A medical imaging system to execute applications written in a hardware independent programming language, the medical imaging system having: a system control with system control software independent from the applications and designed to communicate with the application to facilitate application control of the medical imaging system, the system control having an architecture comprising: a logical representation of hardware usable by the system; a prescription block and a configuration block to determine the hardware needed for execution of the application; a run-time control block to manage the hardware during execution of the application; a set of drivers to control the hardware based on commands received from the run-time control block.