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25.13 Using map-reduce

The map-reduce operation, even without multi-core MPI support, can be used to make programs more scalable and also more efficient. See the map-reduce chapter for more information on implementing map-reduce operations.

Map-reduce allows greater scalability because only the Jacobian of the mapped function for each shard is stored. The Jacobian consists of all of the derivatives of the outputs with respect to the parameters. During execution, the derivatives of the shard are evaluated using nested automatic differentiation. As often happens with modern CPUs, reduced memory overhead leads to increased memory locality and faster execution. The Jacobians are all computed with local memory and their outputs stored contiguously in memory.