Prerequisite Steps

Before you start using any of the Intel® MPI Library functionality, make sure to establish the proper environment settings:

  1. Set up the Intel MPI Library environment by running the setvars.bat file, which is found in your installation directory (by default, C:\Program Files (x86)\Intel\oneAPI\mpi\<version> ).

    Note

    You must run setvars at the start of each  command-line session unless you are using Microsoft Visual Studio for Windows* (Visual Studio runs setvars automatically). See the Intel oneAPI HPC Toolkit Get Started Guide for more details, including options for automatic setup of environment settings.
  2. To run an MPI application on a cluster, the Intel MPI Library needs to know names of all its nodes. Create a text file listing the cluster node names. The format of the file is one name per line, and the lines starting with # are ignored. To get the name of a node, use the hostname utility.

    A sample host file may look as follows:

    > type hosts
    # This line is ignored
    clusternode1
    clusternode2
    clusternode3
    clusternode4

  3. Make sure the Hydra service is installed and running on the cluster nodes. To check this, enter the command:

    > hydra_service -status

    If the service is not running, use the following command to install and run it:

    > hydra_service -install

    Note

    You must run this command as an administrator.

  4. Register your Windows user credentials to enable the process manager to launch MPI jobs. Credentials are encrypted and stored in the registry:

    > mpiexec -register

    If you do not do this in advance, you will be prompted to enter credentials when running an MPI job with mpiexec.

    You can also use the domain-based authorization, which does not ask for your credentials, but requires some additional configuration. See User Authorization for details.

After completing these steps, you are ready to use the Intel MPI Library.