The document discusses revolutionizing microbiome research by leveraging OpenACC for GPU computing, improving the performance of computing Unifrac distance matrices. It outlines the significant speedups achieved by transitioning from CPU to GPU, noting a 20x speedup on modest datasets and highlights the optimizations necessary for maximizing efficiency. The work was funded by various grants from the NSF and NIH, and suggestions for enhancing multi-GPU and non-Linux support are included.