Introduction

cuML accelerates machine learning on GPUs. The library follows a couple of key principles, and understanding these will help you take full advantage cuML.

1. Where possible, match the scikit-learn API

cuML estimators look and feel just like scikit-learn estimators. You initialize them with key parameters, fit them with a fit method, then call predict or transform for inference.

import cuml.LinearRegression

model = cuml.LinearRegression()
model.fit(X_train, y)
y_prediction = model.predict(X_test)

You can find many more complete examples in the Introductory Notebook and in the cuML API documentation.

2. Accept flexible input types, return predictable output types

cuML estimators can accept NumPy arrays, cuDF dataframes, cuPy arrays, 2d PyTorch tensors, and really any kind of standards-based Python array input you can throw at them. This relies on the __array__ and __cuda_array_interface__ standards, widely used throughout the PyData community.

By default, outputs will mirror the data type you provided. So, if you fit a model with a NumPy array, the model.coef_ property containing fitted coefficients will also be a NumPy array. If you fit a model using cuDF’s GPU-based DataFrame and Series objects, the model’s output properties will be cuDF objects. You can always override this behavior and select a default datatype with the memory_utils.set_global_output_type function.

The RAPIDS Configurable Input and Output Types blog post goes into much more detail explaining this approach.

3. Be fast!

cuML’s estimators rely on highly-optimized CUDA primitives and algorithms within libcuml. On a modern GPU, these can exceed the performance of CPU-based equivalents by a factor of anything from 4x (for a medium-sized linear regression) to over 1000x (for large-scale tSNE dimensionality reduction). The cuml.benchmark module provides an easy interface to benchmark your own hardware.

To maximize performance, keep in mind - a modern GPU can have over 5000 cores, so make sure you’re providing enough data to keep it busy! In many cases, performance advantages appear as the dataset grows.

Learn more

To get started learning cuML, walk through the Introductory Notebook. Then try out some of the other notebook examples in the notebooks directory of the repository. Finally, do a deeper dive with the cuML blogs.