Finding the MPI libraries on Windows

Note: While compiling and linking your parallel application via the Intel MPI libraries from within the dedicated Microsoft Visual Studio (MSVC) x64 or x86_64 command prompts, you may receive such linking errors as the following,

LINK : fatal error LNK1181: cannot open input file 'impi.lib'
ERROR in the compiling/linking [2]

This error implies that the path to your Intel MPI library installation files is not properly setup in your environment. You can fix the error by calling the Intel's dedicated Batch script mpivars.bat that Intel has developed solely for the purpose of setting up the MPI environmental variables and paths before using the Intel MPI library. For detailed instructions on how to set up your Intel MPI environment see Getting Started with Intel® MPI Library for Windows OS (Beta). In brief, this script normally lives in a directory like,

C:\Program Files (x86)\IntelSWTools\compilers_and_libraries_2019.4.245\windows\mpi\intel64\bin\mpivars.bat

Locate this setup-script on your system and execute the contents of it on your command line, like the following,

"C:\Program Files (x86)\IntelSWTools\compilers_and_libraries_2019.4.245\windows\mpi\intel64\bin\mpivars.bat"

Intel(R) MPI Library 2019 Update 4 for Windows* Target Build Environment for Intel(R) 64 applications
Copyright 2007-2019 Intel Corporation.

Notice the use of double-quotations around the path to the script. This is ensure that any special escape characters in the path (such as the white-space characters) are properly taken care of.