The context is a comm library on top of MPI. I provide sparse communication with respect to a user-provided "unit" datatype (usually basic types or small contiguous structs). I want to reduce incoming (contiguous) data with a sparse local copy. For example, suppose I have a local buffer of length 5 containing [0,100,200,300,400] and two indexed receives: Recv A: indices=[0,2,3], values = [10,11,12] Recv B: indices=[2,4], values=[23,24] If I reduce using SUM, the operation should complete with [10, 100, 234, 312, 424] in the local buffer. It looks like if I want to use MPI_Reduce_local, I have to create a bunch of tiny arrays: [[0,10], [100], [200,11,23], [300,12], [400,24]] and run MPI_Reduce_local on each row. This is annoying because (a) there is no API for copying the unit datatype and (b) most of these short lists will have length 2 or 3, so this is likely to be slow. I could implement this operation in-place using MPI_Accumulate on COMM_SELF, but I'd rather avoid MPI_Accumulate because it doesn't work with quad-precision or with MINLOC on {long; long}. Related tickets include: https://svn.mpi-forum.org/trac/mpi-forum-web/ticket/338 https://svn.mpi-forum.org/trac/mpi-forum-web/ticket/318 https://svn.mpi-forum.org/trac/mpi-forum-web/ticket/319 Any other suggestions? In lieu of a more elegant solution, I'm going to match on the types and ops that I need to support and write the sparse reduction by hand. In the longer term, I'm curious whether the MPICH developers, and eventually the Forum, may be interested in providing better support for higher level comm libraries like this.