Editing Skeleton (computer programming) (section)

=== Data-parallel ===
These skeleton algorithms are used to develop programs that work on large data based software, usually identifying the connections between data for later use. Data parallel algorithms include ‘maps’, ‘forks’ and ‘reduces’ or ‘scans’.

* ‘Maps’ are the most commonly used data parallel algorithms, and typically involve a single operation completed on a large set of data. To increase efficiency, a number of data sets have this operation applied to them simultaneously, before the data is structured together again at the end. 
* ‘Forks’ are similar to ‘maps’ but they use a different operation for certain data types. This is known as [[Data parallelism|multiple data parallelism]].<ref name=":1" />
* ‘Reduces’ or ‘scans’ are used to apply prefixes to a set of data, before then applying an operation upon the data. These are different to ‘maps’ as they have a set of partial results during the runtime of the method itself.