I considered blades but at least for me I concluded they were a bad fit:
- The centers are large and heavy, needs a fair amount of space, can't really be handled alone. Also means they're shipped on a pallet, which is somewhat expensive.
- Blades are less common overall compared to servers
- Blades have more peculiar I/O than normal servers, you can't just stick an IB card or GPU in there
- The backend I/O modules are fairly rare 2nd hand, so either you find a center which has the modules you want or you're SOL
I have both HP g6 blades and Dell C6100 blades at home...you can get both for about $200/node with 2xquad core and 24G of Ram. The only real issues with them are the NOISE and the electric usage. 16 nodes sounds like your living in an airport. The HP is 8 nodes with a shipping weight of 300 pounds. Cost $350 for shipping, IIRC - pop the sleds and the heaviest part is probably ~25 pounds, easy to handle without help. The HP blades also came with mellonox 10G cards.
