The document describes the porting and optimization of the Unifrac metric for use in GPU computing to significantly reduce microbiome analysis runtimes. By utilizing OpenACC, the researchers achieved speed improvements, enabling analyses previously constrained to large compute clusters to be conducted on fewer resources. The study also found that using lower-precision floating-point math (fp32) yielded nearly identical results to higher precision (fp64), making GPU-enabled personal devices viable for microbiome research.