cudf VS Numba

cuDF Documentation

cudf – GPU DataFrame Library

The interesting thing about Polars is that it does not try to be a drop-in replacement to pandas, like Dask, cuDF, or Modin, and instead has its own expressive API. Despite being a young project, it quickly got popular thanks to its easy installation process and its “lightning fast” performance.

Perhaps the largest for package size is the NVIDIA developed rapids toolkit https://rapids.ai/ . Even still adding things like pandas and some geospatial tools, you rapidly end up with an image well over a gigabyte, despite following cutting edge best practice with docker and python.

Yes sure, that is how OpenMP does; but on the other side: you seem to already do some basic type inference, and building an AST, no? Then you know as well the size and type of your vectors, and can execute actions in parallel if there is enough data to be worth parallelizing. Is there anyone who don't want their code to execute faster if it is possible? Those that do work in big data domain do use threads and vectorized instructions without user having to type in any directive; just import different library. Example, numpy or numpy with cuda backend, or similar GPU accelerated libraries like cudf.

Not the answer about Ray: you could use rapids.ai. I'm using it for for dataframe manipulation on GPU

To put Data Analytics on GPU Steroids, Try RAPIDS cudf https://rapids.ai/

You can scope out https://rapids.ai/. Nvidia's AI toolkits. They have some handy notebooks to poke at to get you started.

I'm surprised to see pytorch and Jax mentioned as alternatives but not numba : https://github.com/numba/numba

I've recently had to implement a few kernels to lower the memory footprint and runtime of some pytorch function : it's been really nice because numba kernels have type hints support (as opposed to raw cupy kernels).

Around the same time, I discovered Numba and was fascinated by how easily it could bring huge performance improvements to Python code.

Simulations are, at least in my experience, numba’s [0] wheelhouse.

[0]: https://numba.pydata.org/

That's very cool. Numba introduces just-in-time compilation to Python via decorators and its sole reason for being is to turn everything it can into abstract syntax trees.

A super-fast backtesting engine built in NumPy and accelerated with Numba.

Regarding speed, I don't agree this is a good argument against Python. For example, it seems no one here has yet mentioned numba, a Python JIT compiler. With a simple decorator you can compile a function to machine code with speeds on par with C. Numba also allows you to easily write cuda kernels for GPU computation. I've never had to drop down to writing C or C++ to write fast and performant Python code that does computationally demanding tasks thanks to numba.

Just for reference,

* Nuitka[0] "is a Python compiler written in Python. It's fully compatible with Python 2.6, 2.7, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 3.8, 3.9, 3.10, and 3.11."

* Pypy[1] "is a replacement for CPython" with builtin optimizations such as on the fly JIT compiles.

* Cython[2] "is an optimising static compiler for both the Python programming language and the extended Cython programming language... makes writing C extensions for Python as easy as Python itself."

* Numba[3] "is an open source JIT compiler that translates a subset of Python and NumPy code into fast machine code."

* Pyston[4] "is a performance-optimizing JIT for Python, and is drop-in compatible with ... CPython 3.8.12"

[0] https://github.com/Nuitka/Nuitka

[1] https://www.pypy.org/

[2] https://cython.org/

[3] https://numba.pydata.org/

[4] https://github.com/pyston/pyston