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I am doing research on CUDA programming.
i have the option to buy a single NVidia Tesla or buy around 4-5 NVidia 480?
what do you recommend?

scatman
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    Depends on your research goal--are you prototyping before acquiring a large system, just trying to learn CUDA, ...? – jeff7 May 10 '10 at 11:39
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    I'm not sure this deserved to be closed as "Off Topic". I think the question Title, answer and up votes show how this question is very relevant to programming. Sure you can talk hardware in another place, but when asking about GPU programming and threading performance having programmer input is very valuable if not essential. – Glenn Nov 05 '11 at 19:05

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Teslas are for more enterprise solutions (where you can expect the Tesla HW to be around for a long time), which the 480s will be here and then no longer in stock within a year (e.g. the GTX 295 is out of stock already). 4-5 480s have more horsepower than 1 Tesla, but that is only beneficial if you can actually leverage the multiple GPUs simultaneously and efficiently.

I work on Jacket, the GPU engine for MATLAB. Jacket has multi-GPU support and would be able to run some problems (say for instance, a bunch of for-loops) better on multiple 480s. However, other problems where multiple GPUs don't matter, will be better on the Tesla which has more memory and higher single card throughput.

Lot's of parameters to consider... good luck!

arrayfire
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