The advent of modern GPUs has radically altered the supercomputer landscape. Video cards used to focus primarily on spitting out pixels to your display, but when programmability entered the picture, it was only a matter of time before that computational power would come to be put to other uses.
CPUs remain important for generalpurpose workloads, running the operating system, browsing the web, and even powering much of the logic behind the graphics in our games. Trying to make a computer where everything ran on the GPU would knock performance in certain tasks back to the proverbial stone age. But if you want to do lots of similar calculations in parallel, that’s precisely what a GPU does for graphics.