nVidia Tesla press release

nVidia announced it's range of Tesla computing products today.

There's the C870, which is a card with specifications similar to a Quadro FX 5600 - it does seem to be quite a bit cheaper than the Quadro FX cards though.

If one of those cards is not enough, there's the D870 which houses two GPU cores in a desktop enclosure and the S870 which houses four GPU cores in a rackmountable 1U chassis. Both the D870 and S870 are connected to an interface card which you need to place in a free PCIe (x8 or x16) slot in your server or workstation. With the S870 you have the choice of connecting to it using either one (four GPUs per connection) or two interface cards (two GPUs per connection).

Using a systemboard (such as this Gigabyte board) which has four PCIe x8/x16 slots, you could conceivably connect 16 GPU cores to a single server. I would assume that both the D870 and S870 have a similar setup to the Quadro Plex, which has been around for a bit longer. You can actually get it with the Quadro FX 5600 cards, which would make it very similar (but probably more expensive and flexible, since it can actually generate a video signal) than the D870.

Luckely, you don't need these products to try things out for yourself. Unlike AMDs CTM software, nVidia's CUDA software is available as a free download. You can find it here. It does require a Gefore 8 card, but one of those can be had for under $200 - a 8800GTS (320 MB) for example.

Here is a fairly high-level article about CUDA. You may also find this nVidia presentation on gpgpu.org interesting.

Maybe I can finally do something interesting with that 8800 I have lying around :-)