Reduction operator

In computer science, the reduction operator is a type of operator that is commonly used in parallel programming to reduce the elements of an array into a single result. Reduction operators are associative and often (but not necessarily) commutative. The reduction of sets of elements is an integral part of programming models such as Map Reduce, where a reduction operator is applied (mapped) to all elements before they are reduced. Other parallel algorithms use reduction operators as primary operations to solve more complex problems. Many reduction operators can be used for broadcasting to distribute data to all processors.