RAPIDS is a suite of open-source software libraries that allows users to execute end-to-end data science and analytics pipelines on GPUs. It includes libraries like cudf, cupy, and cuml that are analogous to popular Python data science libraries like pandas, numpy, and scikit-learn, but are optimized to run calculations on GPUs. This allows for faster performance for large-scale tasks like big data, machine learning, and image processing compared to CPUs.