Lfold
lfold, short for locality-aware fold, is a conceptual operation in computer science and functional programming that generalizes the classical fold (reduce) by applying the fold locally on blocks of data before combining the results. The central idea is to exploit data locality and parallelism by dividing input into chunks that can be processed independently, then merging partial results in a final fold step. The term appears in a subset of literature and talks on memory-hierarchy optimization and streaming computation, where improving cache efficiency and parallel throughput is important.
In its simplest form, lfold partitions a data structure into blocks, computes a block-local fold on each
A common example is summing a large array: divide the array into B blocks, compute the sum
Limitations include the need for operator associativity, overhead from block management, and potential inefficiencies if data