Files
spark-control/image/whisperx_container
Keysat 09a1d3590d v0.12.0:3 - hotfix: build torchaudio from source against NGC's torch
NGC PyTorch (the only base with working torch on Spark's ARM64 + sm_120
Blackwell) doesn't ship torchaudio. Stock pip wheels are amd64-only AND
ABI-incompatible with NGC's custom torch 2.10.0a anyway. Pip install
just fails or crashes at runtime.

Real fix:
  - apt install git cmake build-essential ninja-build
  - pip install git+https://github.com/pytorch/audio.git@v2.5.1
    with TORCH_CUDA_ARCH_LIST="9.0;10.0;12.0" (sm_120 for Blackwell GB10)
  - this compiles torchaudio against the torch already in the image, so
    ABI matches by construction

Then constraints.txt locks torch + torchvision + torchaudio so the later
`pip install whisperx` can't swap any of them.

Cost: +3-5 min to the first install. Docker layer cache reuses the
built torchaudio on every subsequent rebuild.

Torchaudio v2.5.1 is the last tag that builds cleanly against
torch 2.5-2.10 — main branch is too volatile against NGC's alpha torch.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-05-18 21:40:50 -05:00
..

WhisperX container for Spark 2

Replaces the custom Parakeet wrapper + Sortformer overlay (v0.10/v0.11) with a single mainline pipeline:

  • faster-whisper (CTranslate2-optimized) for STT
  • pyannote.audio 3.1 for speaker diarization (sliding-window — handles long files in bounded memory, fixes the Sortformer OOM on 90-min audio)
  • wav2vec2 forced alignment for word-level timestamps

Exposes the same API surface spark-control already proxies to, so the cutover is a one-URL change in the audio proxy:

  • GET /health — readiness probe
  • GET /v1/models — model list
  • POST /v1/audio/transcriptions — OpenAI-shaped STT
  • POST /v1/audio/transcribe-with-speakers — merged diarized transcript (matches spark-control's response shape exactly)

Deploy to Spark 2

# 1. Copy this directory to Spark 2
rsync -av --delete image/whisperx_container/ <spark-user>@<spark-2-ip>:~/whisperx-build/

# 2. SSH in and build
ssh <spark-user>@<spark-2-ip>
cd ~/whisperx-build
docker build -t whisperx-asr:latest .

# 3. Run alongside the existing parakeet-asr (which stays on 8000 for now)
docker run -d --restart unless-stopped --name whisperx-asr \
  --gpus all --memory=40g \
  -p 8002:8002 \
  -v whisperx-models:/root/.cache/huggingface \
  -e HF_TOKEN="$(cat ~/.cache/huggingface/token)" \
  -e WHISPER_MODEL=medium \
  whisperx-asr:latest

# 4. Watch first-start logs (model load + first health check)
docker logs -f whisperx-asr

Model size knobs

WHISPER_MODEL env var. Defaults to medium. Options:

Model Size Speed (GB10) Quality
tiny ~75M ~120x rt low
base ~74M ~80x rt ok
small ~244M ~50x rt good
medium ~769M ~30x rt excellent (default)
large-v3 ~1.5B ~15x rt best

For a 90-min file, medium takes ~3 min STT + ~9 min diarize ≈ ~12 min total.

Memory budget

The --memory=40g cap is intentional. Spark 2 has 122 GB unified, of which ~35 GB is consumed by parakeet-asr + magpie-tts. The 40 GB cap leaves comfortable headroom for both the model weights (~5 GB) and pyannote's in-memory features (~515 GB for a 90-min audio). If WhisperX hits a pathological input it gets OOM-killed cleanly instead of swap-thrashing the whole Spark — the symptom we hit with the unbounded Sortformer container.

Rollback to Parakeet+Sortformer

docker stop whisperx-asr && docker rm whisperx-asr

The parakeet-asr container stays running throughout — spark-control's proxy URL switch is reversible via config or version downgrade.