Configuring a Windows platform for MPI

Note

The Windows HPC feature is not accessible from the Simcenter Amesim Graphical User Interface. See the AMEHPCStudystart section for more details.

Microsoft MPI Microsoft MPI can be used as a remote shell by the HPC framework to distribute studies over several nodes in a Windows HPC cluster. Microsoft MPI is not native on Windows systems; the required setup is explained in the following section.

Download and installation

You can download Microsoft MPI from

Procedure

1. Run the Microsoft MPI installation.

2. Add the Microsoft MPI directory to the PATH variable.

      This gives access to the mpiexec.exe executable for the HPC framework.
   

3. Start the smpd service as a service (independently of the HPC study) on all compute nodes for Microsoft MPI to work.

      You can launch the service on any given node using the following command:
      `smpd -d`
      smpd.exe is the service that receives, authenticates, and runs commands sent from a remote node. Furthermore, the user launching the smpd service on compute nodes should be the same as the user running the simulation.
    
    
      Once the mpiexec.exe executable is accessible using the system’s PATH environment variable and the smpd.exe service is running on compute nodes, it is possible to run HPC studies on the Windows machines using the NATIVE driver and the MPI remote shell. See the The NATIVE Driver section for more details. 
      Note 
        MPI is only used to send remote commands as a simple remote shell would do. In particular, the HPC framework makes no use of the parallelization and communication capabilities of MPI as they are already managed by the existing simulation tools.