Intel MPI - mpiexec.exe does not run, only gives a blank screen

Question

I have some problem running mpiexec.exe on my computer. I installed intel parallel studio xe cluster edition on my windows 10 laptop, which includes intel-mpi. Then I registered my mpi following this page:

https://software.intel.com/en-us/get-started-with-mpi-for-windows

and then I configured my visual studio 2013 according to: https://software.intel.com/en-us/node/610381

However, when I compile and run the MPI program (in Fortran), a cmd window pops up but nothing shows up. The I tried to use

  mpiexec.exe -n 4 myprogram.exe

directly in a cmd window as administrator, nothing shows up after the execution command. I checked my task manager that my program is not running and the entire window just stays like that forever until I hit Ctrl+C to terminate it.

The same program runs perfectly on my desktop and I configured my desktop using exact the same way. I am really confused about this issue since it does not give any error message but a blank screen. Can anyone help me with this issue?

Answer 1

This is almost certainly a known bug in the Intel MPI runtime for x64 (only) that was provided by Intel Parallel Studio XE 2017 Update 1. There is this item buried in the PSXE release notes:

Intel® MPI Library 2017 Update 1 may hang at initialization on a Windows* platform. If this occurs, either set I_MPI_COLL_INTRANODE=pt2pt or run with administrative privileges to work around the hang.

Replacing the x64 libimpimd.dll with the one from 17.0.0 also works. My understanding is that this will be fixed in Update 2.