The guide below will take you through some basic steps to start running automatic transcription jobs on the High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster from a Windows computer. Before you can get started with setting Whisper up, you need to first​​​ Request a Hábrók (HPC) account or log into the HPC portal

Once you have an HPC account, you can navigate to the Files tab in the top menu bar and select Home Directory.

In this window, you will be able to manage your files and folders in HPC. After you finish the Whisper installation, you can upload your audio files from here. You can also download the transcripts from this page, as well as remove any old audio files that have already been transcribed. To begin with, make sure that you are in the Home directory, then open the terminal as shown below.

The next steps explain how to create the Whisper environment you will be working in:

• 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 HPC portal and its folder navigation window to check if the new folders are there.

Note: This step is only needed 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 into your session in the 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 by pressing enter.

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 after you copied it.

Steps to follow to install whisper:

• First, you need to load a module that Whisper will need to run. To do so, copy-paste the line highlighted in grey below into the terminal, as shown in the figure.

  •  module load PyTorch/2.1.2-foss-2023a-CUDA-12.1.1

    

• 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, you should see the following screen:
• As a final step, type 

   deactivate 

  into the terminal, then press “enter”. After this initial installation, you won't need 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 you will see displayed might have changed if newer versions have been released.

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