This chapter provides basic information about getting started with Intel® MPI Library. By default, Intel MPI Library is installed at C:\Program Files (x86)\Intel\icsxe\2013.0.xxx\mpi\ /opt/intel/icsxe/2013.0.xxx/mpi/, where xxx is a package number. The installation directory will be further referred to as <mpi-install-dir>.
For complete documentation, see the Intel MPI Library Getting Started Guide located at <mpi-install-dir> / \ doc / \Getting_Started.htm and Intel MPI Library Reference Manual located at <mpi-install-dir> / \ doc / \Reference_Manual.htm on the system where Intel MPI Library is installed.
The figure below illustrates software architecture of the Intel MPI Library. With Intel MPI Library on Linux* OS systems, you can choose the best interconnection fabric for running an application on a cluster that is based on IA-32 or Intel® 64 architecture. This is done at run time by setting the I_MPI_FABRICS environment variable (See the Selecting a Network Fabric section below.) Execution failure can be avoided even if interconnect selection fails. This feature helps avoid execution failures in batch computing. For such situations, the sockets interface is automatically selected as a backup.
Similarly, using Intel MPI Library on Windows* OS, you can choose the best interconnection fabric for running an application on a cluster that is based on Intel® 64 architecture.
Software architecture of the Intel® MPI Library Interface to Multiple Fast Interconnection Fabrics through shared memory, DAPL* (Direct Access Programming Library), and the TCP/IP fallback