The symbol is mostly used in the context of abelian groups. Therefore, it is usually called "group sum". It can be defined, however, in arbitrary magmas (then it should be called "iterated sum"). If the magma is not required to be commutative or associative, then the order of the summands and the order in which summations are done become important. If the magma is not unital, then one cannot define a meaningful empty sum. See Remark 2. in the comment for df-gsum.