We are going to buy a workstation based on two CPUs
[*]Intel Xeonâ„¢ X5650 Six Core 2,66Ghz, 32nm, 12MB, 95W
with two
[*]NVIDIA® Tesla™ C2075 6GB Compute Boards.
The options for the OS are
[*]Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.X BASIC MULTI OS [for ~260 € ] or[*]GNU/LinuxFedora, Ubuntu , CentOS [for ~50 € ]
Does Red Hat Enterprise Linux have some particular advantage with respect to the second, cheaper option?
We intend to use the workstation more for high-speed parallel computing than for image processing.
I guess that RHEL comes with a support from RH, which explains the price premium… Beside this, any Linux distribution should allow you to run cuda. Some are officially supported by NVIDIA, some are not, but you should be able to run anyway (provided you use a decently recent distribution).
FYI, the list of officially supported Linux distributions is on this web page.
The only actual question here is whether or not CUDA comes pre-configured with the machine. If not, the interest of having Linux pre-installed in the first place is questionable. You can download and install it for free yourself, and then spend a bit of effort having cuda installed on to of it.