Setting up MS MPI (Microsoft MPI) on Windows 10 / Windows 7

How to install MS MPI on Windows OS

MPI is a Message Passing library standard that allows programmers to develop applications that can run in parallel on multiple independent systems. By doing so, we can harness the computing power and memory of multiple systems to solve a single problem.

The time required to solve a problem can be cut down by adding more workers i.e., compute systems.

Microsoft has an implementation of MPI, called as MS MPI.

This was my first attempt to setup MPI on Windows 10 and Windows 7 workstations. I did many such setups on Linux but never tried on Windows.

I will just brief the process and the issues I have faced, this might help you as well.

1. Download MS MPI packages from the official Microsoft website.

Typically, you have to download MSMPI SDK which has set of libraries to compile and linkup MPI applications on Windows and MSMPI executables to launch and run MPI applications.

msmpisdk.msi
msmpisetup.exe

2. Install both of them. Just double click and acept license agreement. Installation is pretty simple if you are lucky. Unfortunately, I wasn’t. I got the following weird error with not much further info.

“MS-MPI Installation failed with error code 1603”

I was struggling to get more information on error so that I can debug it. You can track whatever you want in Linux by looking at installer logs, system logs, strace, gtsack etc., I had no clue how to do it on Windows.

Finally, I figured out a way to enable installer logs.

To enable Installer logging on Windows:

Open the registry by using Regedit.exe, and then create the following subkey and keys:

Resolution : I did Windows update and restarted my workstaions and it worked 🙂