Get Started with the Intel® MPI Library for Windows* OS

Download PDF
ID 768726
Date 12/16/2022
Public

A newer version of this document is available. Customers should click here to go to the newest version.

Document Table of Contents
Document Table of Contents x
Get Started with Intel® MPI Library for Intel® oneAPI on Windows* OS
Get Started with Intel® MPI Library for Intel® oneAPI on Windows* OS x
Key Features Prerequisites Building and Running MPI Programs Compiling an MPI Program Running an MPI Program Troubleshooting More Resources Notices and Disclaimers
Get Started with Intel® MPI Library for Intel® oneAPI on Windows* OS

Get Started with Intel® MPI Library for Intel® oneAPI on Windows* OS

The Intel® MPI Library enables you to create, maintain, and test advanced applications that have performance advantages on high-performance computing (HPC) clusters based on Intel® processors.

The Intel MPI Library is available as a standalone product and as part of the Intel® oneAPI HPC Toolkit.The Intel MPI Library is a multi-fabric message passing library that implements the Message Passing Interface, version 3.1 (MPI-3.1) specification. Use the library to develop applications that can run on multiple cluster interconnects.

The Intel MPI Library has the following features:

  • Low overhead enables analysis of large amounts of data
  • MPI tuning utility for accelerating your applications
  • Interconnect independence and flexible runtime fabric selection

The product consists of the following main components:

  • Compilation tools, including compiler drivers such as mpiicc and mpifort
  • Include files and modules
  • Dynamic (.dll) libraries, debug libraries, interface libraries, and program database(.pdb) files
  • Process Manager and tools to run programs
  • Test code
  • Documentation provided as a separate package or available from the Intel Developer Zone

Intel MPI Library also includes Intel® MPI Benchmarks, which enable you to measure MPI operations on various cluster architectures and MPI implementations. For details, see the Intel® MPI Benchmarks User Guide. Source code is available in the GitHub repository.

Key Features

The Intel MPI Library has the following major features:

  • MPI-1, MPI-2.2 and MPI-3.1 specification conformance
  • Interconnect independence

  • Supported Languages:

    • For GNU* compilers: C, C++, Fortran 77, Fortran 95
    • For Intel® compilers: C, C++, Fortran 77, Fortran 90, Fortran 95

Prerequisites

Before you start using Intel MPI Library, complete the following steps:

1. Run the setvars.bat script to set the environment variables for the Intel MPI Library. The script is located in the installation directory (by default, C:\Program Files (x86)\Intel\oneAPI).

2. Install and run the Hydra services on the compute nodes. Open the command prompt as an administrator and enter: 

> hydra_service -install 
> hydra_service -start

3. Register your credentials: 

> mpiexec -register

For detailed system requirements, see Intel® MPI Library System Requirements.

Building and Running MPI Programs

Compiling an MPI Program

1. Make sure you have the desired compiler installed and configured properly. For example, for the Intel® C++ Compiler, run: 

> icl

If the command is not recognized, add the compiler to your PATH. For the Intel® compilers, you can run the vars.bat script from corresponding directory.

2. Compile your program using the appropriate compiler driver. For example, for a test C program: 

> mpiicc -o test.exe <install-dir>\test\test.c

Running an MPI Program

Execute the program using the mpiexec command. For example, for the test program: 

> mpiexec -n <# of processes> test.exe

To specify the hosts to run the program on, use the -hosts option: 

> mpiexec -n <# of processes> -ppn <# of processes per node> -hosts <host1>,<host2>,...,<hostN> test.exe

Troubleshooting

If you encounter problems when using Intel MPI Library, go through the following general procedures to troubleshoot them:

  • Check known issues and limitations in the Release Notes.
  • Check hosts accessibility. Run a simple non-MPI application (for example, hostname utility) on the problem hosts with mpiexec. This check helps you reveal an environmental problem , or connectivity problem (for example, unreachable hosts).
  • Run the MPI application with debug information enabled. To enable the debug information, set the environment variable I_MPI_DEBUG=6. You can also set a different debug level to get more detailed information. This action helps you find the problem component.

See more details in the “Troubleshooting” section of the Developer Guide.

More Resources

Level Two Title