How Much of a Data Science Workflow Can Run on a GPU Today? Part 1: Accelerating Data Preparation

GPU acceleration can be applied to traditional data science workflows involving tabular data, not just deep learning. NVIDIA's RAPIDS suite offers cuDF, a library with a pandas-like API for performing DataFrame operations directly on the GPU. For existing projects, a `cudf.pandas` accelerator mode can speed up pandas code with minimal to no changes. Benchmarks demonstrate that using cuDF for tasks like grouping and aggregation provides significant performance speedups over CPU-based pandas.