"A stream is simply a sequence of operations that are performed in order on the device. Operations in different streams can be interleaved and in some cases overlapped—a property that can be used to hide data transfers between host and device." source: Best Practice Guide: 3.1.2 Asynchronous Transfers and Overlapping Transfers with Computation http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?s=c947009dbdd8bc5aba12c471994ea143&showtopic=91632