A method and device for configuring data packets for a data driven processor, the data driven information processor having a data packet producing device that produces the data packets, and a data flow ring architecture for operating (according to data flow computational protocol) upon data packets received from the data packet producing device. The data packet producing device configures each data packet to include a multidimensional generation number. The multidimensional generation number has at least two components, enabling it to identify at least two things to the data flow ring architecture. The first component identifies a generation to which data contained in the data packet belongs. The second component identifies an additional attribute of the data contained in the data packet. Where the data driven information processor is doing image processing: the first component of the multidimensional generation number is the field/image number; and the second component of the multidimensional generation number is the location of a pixel in the field/image, thus the pixel location is the additional attribute. The second component can be represented in two parts, the first part being the line of the image in which the pixel is located and the second part being the column in which the pixel is located.