Message Passing Interface (MPI) components must be installed to use MPI-based parallel execution in Abaqus/Standard, to use domain-level parallelization in Abaqus/Explicit, or to run any job in Abaqus/CFD (regardless of the number of CPUs). If your Abaqus users will be running these types of simulations, you must have the required MPI components preinstalled or allow the Abaqus installer to install them for you. MPI is a middleware scheme used to facilitate interprocessor communication. MPI-based parallelization is available for both computer clusters and shared memory architecture platforms. The necessary MPI software is included with Abaqus and is installed during the Abaqus product installation on most platforms; see “Visual C++ and MPI Libraries,” Section 2.4.1.