Unable to start parallel solver

[ranger]

Hello All,

I'm having difficulty getting Elmer to execute the parallel solver "ElmerSolver_mpi.exe". For reference, I've installed the Elmer windows version (ElmerFEM-gui-mpi-Windows-AMD64) and have the most recent Microsoft MPI installed. I'm trying to run a transient heating solution of a two-body geometry/mesh. The solution works as expected in serial, but when I try to run the same computation in parallel the parallel solver wont start. In fact, the mesh partitioning seems to work as expected without error, however the last line I see in the "Solver log" reads: "Unable to start parallel solver".

After searching around on the forum, I also implemented a few changes to the "Parallel settings" GUI which seemed to help other users:

Changed Executable to: C:/Program Files/MPICH2/bin/mpiexec.exe
Changed Arguments to: -n %n -genvlist PATH,ELMER_HOME ElmerSolver_mpi.exe

Unfortunately, these don't seem to resolve the issue for me.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Also, I've attached the .sif and .msh files I'm currently working with.

Thanks

[kevinarden]

If you were doing it from the command line and the elmer exec was in C:/elmer/bin then it would be

but I thought windows was \ and unix was /, so maybe you need to change the slashes

C:\Program Files\MPICH2\bin\mpiexec.exe -n 4 C:\elmer\bin\ElmerSolver_mpi.exe

If you have the slashes right then the variables are not set correctly to get the above command.

[ranger]

Thank you for the prompt response. The backslashes seemed to be the trick. Rookie mistake!

Also, for anyone who comes across this issue, you should be aware that there is concatenation issue with the path string name on Windows in the Elmer GUI. If you have a space in the path name, say for example "C:Program Files\Elmer\bin", the Elmer GUI truncates the path up to the space, i.e. "C:Program". I believe this is a Linux thing. So to fix that you should put the full path to ElmerSolver_mpi.exe in quotations in the arguments box. It should read something like: -n %n "C:\Program Files\Elmer 8.4-Release\bin\ElmerSolver_mpi.exe"

Hope that saves some time for future users.

Thanks again!