MPI belongs to the Single Program Multiple Data (SPMD) programming technique.

SPMD is a programming technique in which all processes execute the same program, each on different data. The distinction in executions between different processes occurs by differentiating the flow of the program, based on the local rank of the process.

SPMD is a programming technique in which a single program is executed by several processes at the same time, but each process can operate on different data. At the same time, the processes can execute both the same instruction and different instructions. Obviously, the program will contain appropriate instructions that allow the execution of only parts of the code and/or to operate on a subset of the data. This can be implemented using different programming models, and all executables start at the same time.