# Independent work

Units of work that can each produce their result without needing another unit’s output. A precondition for distributing anything.

Source: https://university.eugo.io/glossary/independent-work

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The property that decides whether distribution helps at all. If each unit needs another unit’s result, the work is sequential no matter how many workers are available.

## Related terms

- [Task](https://university.eugo.io/glossary/task) — One unit of distributed work: a single call to a function decorated with the distribute decorator. Tasks are stateless, so each call starts fresh.
- [Partition](https://university.eugo.io/glossary/partition) — One independently processable chunk of a dataset. Partition size is the main lever on how well a workload parallelizes.
- [Shared state](https://university.eugo.io/glossary/shared-state) — Data that more than one task reads or writes. Shared mutable state is what turns a parallel run into a race condition.