cuDF

Judgement

What it is

Building block

What it does

NVIDIA's GPU DataFrame library with a pandas-like API, a no-code-change pandas accelerator, a GPU engine for Polars and a Spark plugin.

Adopt it when

You process large tabular data and have NVIDIA GPUs available, especially to speed up existing pandas or Polars code.

Watch out

It needs NVIDIA hardware and CUDA, so it ties your pipeline to that vendor.

Ready for

Production-ready

Runs as

Library

Built with

C++, CUDA, Python and Apache Arrow

How established

Established: started 9 years ago, latest release v26.10.02.

What the license allows

You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.

Judged on 2026-11-06 from the project's README and GitHub data. The license and age lines are worked out directly.

Built from

Follow it down: cuDF → LLVM project → runs on a microchip

How compilers were built, back to punched paper tape

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