Motivation

What is CUDA Python?

NVIDIA’s CUDA Python provides Cython bindings and Python wrappers for the driver and runtime API for existing toolkits and libraries to simplify GPU-based accelerated processing. Python is one of the most popular programming languages for science, engineering, data analytics, and deep learning applications. The goal of CUDA Python is to unify the Python ecosystem with a single set of interfaces that provide full coverage of and access to the CUDA host APIs from Python.

Why CUDA Python?

CUDA Python provides uniform APIs and bindings for inclusion into existing toolkits and libraries to simplify GPU-based parallel processing for HPC, data science, and AI.

Numba, a Python compiler from Anaconda that can compile Python code for execution on CUDA-capable GPUs, provides Python developers with an easy entry into GPU-accelerated computing and a path for using increasingly sophisticated CUDA code with a minimum of new syntax and jargon. Numba has its own CUDA driver API bindings that can now be replaced with CUDA Python. With CUDA Python and Numba, you get the best of both worlds: rapid iterative development with Python and the speed of a compiled language targeting both CPUs and NVIDIA GPUs.

CuPy is a NumPy/SciPy compatible Array library, from Preferred Networks, for GPU-accelerated computing with Python. CUDA Python simplifies the CuPy build and allows for a faster and smaller memory footprint when importing the CuPy Python module. In the future, when more CUDA Toolkit libraries are supported, CuPy will have a lighter maintenance overhead and have fewer wheels to release. Users benefit from a faster CUDA runtime!

Our goal is to help unify the Python CUDA ecosystem with a single standard set of interfaces, providing full coverage of, and access to, the CUDA host APIs from Python. We want to provide a foundation for the ecosystem to build on top of in unison to allow composing different accelerated libraries together to solve the problems at hand. We also want to lower the barrier to entry for Python developers to utilize NVIDIA GPUs.