A supercomputer is a computer that performs at or near the currently highest operational rate for computers. Traditionally, supercomputers have been used for scientific and engineering applications that must handle very large databases or do a great amount of computation
Supercomputers normally make use of customized compute units (called blades) which usually house multiple nodes (CPUs, GPUs). In the case of the Cray XK6, the most powerful blade in the world, each blade contains four nodes, and each node houses a 16-core AMD Opteron CPU and Nvidia Tesla GPU, and 16 or 32GB of RAM