The Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP) algorithm has become
widely popular for its ease of use, quality of results, and support for
exploratory, unsupervised, supervised, and semi-supervised learning. While many
algorithms can be ported to a GPU in a simple and direct fashion, such efforts
have resulted in inefficient and inaccurate versions of UMAP. We show a number
of techniques that can be used to make a faster and more faithful GPU version
of UMAP, and obtain speedups of up to 100x in practice. Many of these design
choices/lessons are general purpose and may inform the conversion of other
graph and manifold learning algorithms to use GPUs. Our implementation has been
made publicly available as part of the open source RAPIDS cuML library
(https://github.com/rapidsai/cuml)