The functions in this section perform a global reduce operation (such as sum, max, logical AND, etc.) across all the members of a group. The reduction operation can be either one of a predefined list of operations, or a user-defined operation. The global reduction functions come in several flavors: a reduce that returns the result of the reduction at one node, an all-reduce that returns this result at all nodes, and a scan (parallel prefix) operation. In addition, a reduce-scatter operation combines the functionality of a reduce and of a scatter operation.