The guide below will take you through some basic steps to start running automatic transcription jobs on the high performance computing cluster from a Windows computer. In short it entails:

• ​​​​​​Get a Habrok (HPC) account
• Install the Mobaxterm SSH client
• Connect to HPC with the Mobaxterm client
• Create a folder “whisper_audio” in the root folder of your HPC session by inputting the following command:
  • mkdir $HOME/whisper_audio
• In the same way, you should also create an output folder in the same place by inputting:
  • mkdir $HOME/whisper_output
• If this step of the installation succeeded, then you should be able to display the new folders in MobaXterm as shown in the figures below.
• You can also use the left-hand folder navigation to check if the new folders are there.

Note: This step is only needed for the first time you set up Whisper. After you have installed the program for the first time, you can skip directly to the next part of the guide to run the program.

When logged in to your session in the Mobaxterm terminal, or in any other terminal, you will have a prompt where you can enter commands. In order to run Whisper, you will need to create the proper environment in your HPC session. To do so, copy the grey highlighted lines below one by one into your terminal and run them separately.

Note: To copy text into the terminal, ctrl+V will not work. Use either the right mouse click, then select paste from the drop-down menu or, if you have a mouse wheel, click on the terminal with the mouse wheel to paste the text directly.

Steps to follow to install whisper:

• First, you need to load a module that whisper will need to run. To do, copy-paste the line highlighted in grey below into the terminal, as shown in the figure.
  • module load PyTorch/1.12.1-foss-2022a-CUDA-11.7.0
• Then you need to create the virtual environment where you will install whisper. Copy-paste the line below into the terminal.
  • python3 -m venv $HOME/.envs/whisper
• Now, activate the newly created environment, by copy-pasting the line below.
  • source $HOME/.envs/whisper/bin/activate
• Before you install whisper, you need to make sure to have the latest version of some programs. Copy the two lines below separately into the terminal, as shown in the figures:
  • pip install –upgrade pip
  • pip install –upgrade wheel
• Finally, you can install whisper by running the command below:
  • pip install git+https://github.com/openai/whisper.git
• If everything went well, this is the screen you expect to see.
• As a final step, type deactivate into the terminal, then press “enter”. After this initial installation, you won't be needing to manually activate the whisper environment anymore.
• If you wish to fully close the environment and also close the HPC session directly, type exit instead of deactivate.

Note: The version numbers displayed in this guide for the programs you have installed and upgraded reflect the most recent versions at the time this guide was written. The numbers might change in your case, as newer versions might have been released in the time since.

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