Running the Client

Task 1 – Verifying Cluster State

In this task, you will verify that the nodes in your cluster are online.

1. Open the HPC 2008 R2 Cluster Manager application from Start | All Programs | Microsoft HPC Pack 2008 R2 | HPC Cluster Manager.

2. In the Cluster Manager application, enter the Node Management section and verify that the Windows Azure nodes in the cluster are online, as shown in Figure 8:

   Figure 8

   Verifying the state of the Windows Azure nodes

Task 2 - Running the Client Application

In this task, you will run the WPF client application that submits the parametric sweep job and monitors its state.

1. Open Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 from Start | All Programs | Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 | Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.
2. Open the Blast.sln solution file located in the Blast\Source\Blast folder.
3. Expand the Client folder, right-click the BlastClient project, and select Set as StartUp Project.

4. From the Debug menu, select Start Without Debugging and wait for the WPF application to start and display the screen shown in Figure 9:

   Figure 9

   The BLAST client application

5. Enter the user name, password, and domain of an administrative user in the HPC cluster, select the number of nucleotides to match, and click the Submit button.
6. After the job submits to the HPC Job Scheduler, a confirmation message will show. Click OK to close it.

7. While the job is running, you will see a progress bar showing the progress of the job and a list of files (represented as file names and hash keys) that have been uploaded to the BOV website, as shown in Figure 10:

   Figure 10

   Monitoring the progress of the parametric sweep job

8. You can double-click on any of the hash keys to see the BOV web page with information about the selected nucleotide matches, as shown in Figure 11:

   Figure 11

   The BOV summary page for the BLAST output file

9. Click any of the matches and follow the instructions in the BOV web page to see a graphical representation of the match, as shown in Figure 12:

   Figure 12

   High-scoring pair image for the nucleotide match

10. While you wait for the application to finish running, you can also inspect the status of the parametric sweep job using the HPC 2008 R2 Cluster Manager utility, as shown in Figure 13:

    Figure 13

    Status of the parametric sweep job

11. Wait a couple of minutes for the application to complete.
12. After the job is completed, you can continue to view the matches through the BOV web page.