The system provides energy-efficiency of computing nodes in a cluster such that application level compatibility is maintained with legacy programs. This enables clusters to grow in computer capability while optimizing and managing expenses in energy usage, cooling infrastructure and real estate costs. The present technology may leverage existing purpose built parallel processing hardware, such as for example GPU hardware cards, with software to provide the functionality discussed herein. The present technology may create and add to an existing Hadoop cluster, or other distributed data processing framework, an augmented data node with enhanced compute per watt capability using off the shelf parallel processing hardware (e.g., GPU cards) while preserving the application level compatibility with the framework infrastructure.