Prime-approved switch of the fleet STT seat (fv-ml1 :8300, LiteLLM ext-stt/ whisper-1, caller talk) from the sherpa-onnx int8 seat to arm B-bf16w of the 2026-09-30 A/B (docs/pfi/parakeet-seat-ab-2026-09-30.md): p50 33/36/42/71 ms vs the old seat's 187/308/626 measured on the same card today, WER 1.965/3.026 vs the A/B floor 1.97/3.09. All three seat defects fixed: 12-min file 200s (windowed at 360 s after a GPU 0 OOM on one whole request; the A/B's own long-form method), no pause truncation, no long-form dropout. GPU 0 room: gen-small --gpu-memory-utilization 0.48 -> 0.36 (0.46 and 0.40 refuse their boot check; cyberprev+voices hold the card). Its KV is byte- pinned, so the boot log is token-identical: 670,142 tokens / 2.56x before and after. Seat rests 2,088 MiB; GPU 0 keeps ~1.9 GB free. Two runtime landmines documented in the README: NeMo's attention mask is materialised T x T even under local attention (hence the window), and httptools 0.8.0 writes a NUL into the HTTP status line that httpx — i.e. LiteLLM — rejects, so the image ships plain uvicorn with --http h11. Old seat stopped, not removed: docker stop parakeet-nemo && docker start parakeet is the rollback. License: NVIDIA Open Model License (accepted by Prime 2026-09-30); note in stacks/parakeet-nemo/README.md.
3.7 KiB
parakeet-nemo — the fleet speech seat (parakeet-unified-en under NeMo)
STT seat on fv-ml1, port 8300, behind LiteLLM as ext-stt / whisper-1; the caller is talk.
Switched over from the sherpa-onnx int8 seat (stacks/parakeet) on 2026-09-30 on Prime's order,
after the A/B in docs/pfi/parakeet-seat-ab-2026-09-30.md (arm B-bf16w won: p50 23/27/33 ms vs
the old seat's 144/260/565 ms at 1–3/3–8/8–20 s, lower WER on every set).
Why this runtime
The old seat was slow because of its RUNTIME: the int8 ONNX graph ran on one CPU thread. The defects it carried — HTTP 500 above ~400 s of audio, long-form dropouts, utterance truncation after a 1.5 s digital-silence pause — are all int8-export behaviours. This seat runs the model under NeMo torch with bf16 weights, full-precision mel front end, and NeMo's local-attention long-audio mode (±128), which is what removes all three defects.
Hard-wired seat invariants (app.py — each one is load-bearing, do not "clean up")
- bf16 cast BEFORE
.to("cuda")— restoring fp32 onto the GPU and casting there spikes the load by ~1.5 GB. GPU 0 cannot absorb that; it is shared with two vLLM seats. - Warm-up at the longest served length — the CUDA-graph greedy decoder costs ~330 ms extra on
the first call at a new maximum length. The entrypoint warm-up runs ascending silent clips
(
WARMUP_SECONDS, default 1,8,60). rel_pos_local_attn±128 — a 30-minute file transcribes in ~2.6 s in ONE request; memory grows linearly in length instead of quadratically.dither = 0.0— dither is a training-time augmentation; it makes identical files decode differently call to call.- NeMo 3.0.0 is a floor — released 2.7.3 lacks this encoder's
att_chunk_context_size. - No httptools;
--http h11is explicit. httptools 0.8.0 (pulled byuvicorn[standard], and auto-selected by uvicorn when importable) writes a NUL into the response status line —HTTP/1.1 200\x00OK— that h11/httpx reject withRemoteProtocolError: illegal status line. curl tolerates it; LiteLLM reaches this seat via httpx, so every consumer would break. Proven A/B on the same image:--http h11clean,--http httptoolsdirty (2026-10-01). The image installs plainuvicorn==0.53.0for exactly this reason.
License
nvidia/parakeet-unified-en-0.6b is distributed under the NVIDIA Open Model License Agreement
(commercial/non-commercial use permitted; Prime accepted the terms 2026-09-30). This replaces the
CC-BY-4.0 terms of the previous seat's weights for this service. Internal use: no NOTICE file
required; keep this section as the license note. Weights pinned at HF revision
fe53cd885760c96b6a5f51a0bfd362cb4584a98b (sha256 ec23ed91…), mounted read-only from
/tank/aimodels/huggingface, HF_HUB_OFFLINE=1.
GPU 0 room
The seat rests ~2.5 GB, serves to ~2.8 GB, loads under ~3.0 GB (measured on GPU 0 at cut-over;
see the ops log). Room was taken from vllm-gen-small: --gpu-memory-utilization 0.48 → 0.46
(its .env), KV cache and concurrency re-read from its boot log at each change. ⚠ util does NOT
predict resident VRAM — after any gen-small restart, measure nvidia-smi Free on GPU 0 before
believing the fraction. GPU 1 is NOT an option: its free memory is intern-decision's 32k headroom.
Rollback
The old seat was STOPPED, not removed: docker stop parakeet-nemo && docker start parakeet
restores the sherpa seat on :8300 exactly as before (container and image both kept).
Deploy
Build on fv-ml1 in a versioned dir under /opt/docker/src/ (house convention), tag
local/parakeet-nemo:nemo-X.Y.Z, point .env at it, docker compose up -d. Acceptance harness
and the A/B's paired latency/WER tooling: /tank/spikes/parakeet-ab on fv-ml1 (do not delete).