cuStrings - GPU String Manipulation

  

NOTE: For the latest stable README.md ensure you are on the master branch.

Built with Pandas DataFrame's columnar string operations in mind, cuStrings is a GPU string manipulation library for splitting, applying regexes, concatenating, replacing tokens, etc in arrays of strings.

nvStrings (the Python bindings for cuStrings), provides a pandas-like API that will be familiar to data engineers & data scientists, so they can use it to easily accelerate their workflows without going into the details of CUDA programming.

For example, the following snippet loads a CSV, then uses the GPU to perform replacements typical in data-preparation tasks.

import nvstrings, nvcategory
import requests

url="https://github.com/plotly/datasets/raw/master/tips.csv"
content = requests.get(url).content.decode('utf-8')

#split content into a list, remove header
host_lines = content.strip().split('\n')[1:]

#copy strings to gpu
gpu_lines = nvstrings.to_device(host_lines)

#split into columns on gpu
gpu_columns = gpu_lines.split(',')
gpu_day_of_week = gpu_columns[4]

#use gpu `replace` to re-encode tokens on GPU
for idx, day in enumerate(['Sun', 'Mon', 'Tues', 'Wed', 'Thur', 'Fri', 'Sat']):
    gpu_day_of_week = gpu_day_of_week.replace(day, str(idx))

# or, use nvcategory's builtin GPU categorization
cat = nvcategory.from_strings(gpu_columns[4])

# copy category keys to host and print
print(cat.keys())

# copy "cleaned" strings to host and print
print(gpu_day_of_week)

Output:

['Fri', 'Sat', 'Sun', 'Thur']

# many entries omitted for brevity
['0', '0', '0', ..., '6', '6', '4']

cuStrings is a standalone library with no other dependencies. Other RAPIDS projects (like cuDF) depend on cuStrings and its nvStrings Python bindings.

For more examples, see Python API documentation.

Quick Start

Please see the Demo Docker Repository, choosing a tag based on the NVIDIA CUDA version you’re running. This provides a ready to run Docker container with example notebooks and data, showcasing how you can utilize cuStrings.

Installation

Conda

cuStrings can be installed with conda (miniconda, or the full Anaconda distribution) from the rapidsai channel:

# for CUDA 9.2
conda install -c nvidia -c rapidsai -c numba -c conda-forge -c defaults \
    nvstrings=0.8 python=3.6 cudatoolkit=9.2

# or, for CUDA 10.0
conda install -c nvidia -c rapidsai -c numba -c conda-forge -c defaults \
    nvstrings=0.8 python=3.6 cudatoolkit=10.0

We also provide nightly conda packages built from the tip of our latest development branch.

Note: cuStrings is supported only on Linux, and with Python versions 3.6 or 3.7.

See the Get RAPIDS version picker for more OS and version info.

Build/Install from Source

See detailed build instructions.

Build and install libcustrings and custrings using build.sh. Build.sh creates build dir under cpp/ directory found in the root of the git repository. build.sh depends on the nvcc executable being on your path or defined in $CUDACXX.

$ ./build.sh -h                                     # Display help and exit
$ ./build.sh -n custrings                           # Build the custrings target without installing
$ ./build.sh                                        # Build and install libcustrings and custrings

## Contributing

Please see our [guide for contributing to cuStrings](CONTRIBUTING.md).

## Contact

Find out more details on the [RAPIDS site](https://rapids.ai/community.html)

## <div align="left"><img src="img/rapids_logo.png" width="265px"/></div> Open GPU Data Science

The RAPIDS suite of open source software libraries aim to enable execution of end-to-end data science and analytics pipelines entirely on GPUs. It relies on NVIDIA® CUDA® primitives for low-level compute optimization, but exposing that GPU parallelism and high-bandwidth memory speed through user-friendly Python interfaces.