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:

The product consists of the following main components:

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:

Prerequisites

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

1. Set the environment variables: from the installation directory (the default directory is shown below), run the vars.bat batch file:

> <install-dir>\mpi\<version>.<update>\env\vars.bat 

where <install-dir> is the Intel MPI Library 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 the “System Requirements” section in Release Notes.

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:

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

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