Pandas vs CuPy: What are the differences?

What is Pandas? High-performance, easy-to-use data structures and data analysis tools for the Python programming language. Flexible and powerful data analysis / manipulation library for Python, providing labeled data structures similar to R data.frame objects, statistical functions, and much more.

What is CuPy? A NumPy-compatible matrix library accelerated by CUDA. It is an open-source matrix library accelerated with NVIDIA CUDA. CuPy provides GPU accelerated computing with Python. It uses CUDA-related libraries including cuBLAS, cuDNN, cuRand, cuSolver, cuSPARSE, cuFFT and NCCL to make full use of the GPU architecture.

Pandas and CuPy can be categorized as "Data Science" tools.

Some of the features offered by Pandas are:

• Easy handling of missing data (represented as NaN) in floating point as well as non-floating point data
• Size mutability: columns can be inserted and deleted from DataFrame and higher dimensional objects
• Automatic and explicit data alignment: objects can be explicitly aligned to a set of labels, or the user can simply ignore the labels and let Series, DataFrame, etc. automatically align the data for you in computations

On the other hand, CuPy provides the following key features:

• It's interface is highly compatible with NumPy in most cases it can be used as a drop-in replacement
• Supports various methods, indexing, data types, broadcasting and more
• You can easily make a custom CUDA kernel if you want to make your code run faster, requiring only a small code snippet of C++

Pandas and CuPy are both open source tools. Pandas with 25K GitHub stars and 10.1K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than CuPy with 4.14K GitHub stars and 373 GitHub forks.