The Cray XK7 system contains 18, 688 nodes, with each holding a 16-core AMD Opteron 6274 processor and an NVIDIA Tesla K20 graphics processing unit (GPU) accelerator.
The graphics processing unit (GPU) "has become a much more important processor in a system than it was just a few years ago, when everything was 2-D in nature, " says Sam Blackman, chief executive of Elemental Technologies, a company that builds video-processing software that runs on Nvidia's gear.