TextSynth Server

1 Introduction

TextSynth Server is a web server proposing a REST API to large language models. They can be used for example for text completion, question answering, classification, chat, translation, image generation, ...

It has the following characteristics:

All is included in a single binary. Very few external dependencies (Python is not needed) so installation is easy on Linux and Windows.
Supports many Transformer variants (GPT-J, GPT-NeoX, OPT, Fairseq GPT, M2M100, CodeGen, GPT2, T5, RWKV, Llama 2/3, Falcon, MPT, Mistral, Whisper) and Stable Diffusion.
Integrated REST JSON API for text completion, translation, image generation and audio transcription.
Integrated HTML GUI for testing.
Very high performance for small and large batches on CPU and GPU. Support of dynamic batching to handle a large number of simultaneous requests.
Efficient custom 8, 4 and 3 bit quantization.
Larger models work optimally on lower cost GPUs (e.g. RTX 3090, RTX A6000) thanks to efficient quantization.
Support of speculative sampling for even faster inference.
Support of grammar based sampling to constraint the model output according to a BNF grammar or a JSON schema.
Uses the LibNC library for simple tensor manipulation using the C language.
Simple command line tools (ts_test, ts_sd, ts_chat, ts_audiototext) are provided to test the various models.

The free version is available only for non commercial use. Commercial organizations must buy the commercial version. The commercial version adds the following features:

High performance handling of simultaneous requests.
Memory usage limitation.
Multiple models can be served at the same time.
SSL/TLS requests.

2 Quick Start

2.1 Linux

2.1.1 First steps

The TextSynth Server works only on x86 CPUs supporting AVX2 (all Intel CPUs since 2013 support it). The installation was tested on Fedora and CentOS/RockyLinux 8 distributions. Other distributions should work provided the libmicrohttpd library is installed.

Install the libmicrohttpd library. If you use Fedora, RHEL, CentOS or RockyLinux, you can type as root:
```
  dnf install libmicrohttpd
```
ts_test can be used without these libraries. ts_server needs libmicrohttpd. Audio transcription requires the FFmpeg executable in order to convert the input audio file.
Extract the archive and go into its directory:
```
  tar xtf ts_server-##version##.tar.gz

  cd ts_server-##version##
```
when ##version## is the version of the program.
Download one small example model such as gpt2_117M.bin from the ts_server web page.
Use it to generate text with the "ts_test" utility:
```
  ./ts_test -m gpt2_117M.bin g "The Linux kernel is"
```
The -T option can be used to use more or less CPU cores (the default is the number of physical cores).
Start the server:
```
  ./ts_server ts_server.cfg
```
You can edit the ts_server.cfg JSON configuration file if you want to use another model.

Try one request:

  curl http://localhost:8080/v1/engines/gpt2_117M/completions \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"prompt": "The Linux kernel is", "max_tokens": 100}'

The full request syntax is documented at https://textsynth.com/documentation.html.

You can use the integrated GUI by exploring with your browser:
```
http://localhost:8080
```

Now you are ready to load a larger model and to use it from your application.

2.1.2 GPU usage

You need an Nvidia Ampere, ADA or Hopper GPU (e.g. RTX 3090, RTX 4090, RTX A6000, A100 or H100) in order to use the server with cuda 11.x or 12.x installed. Enough memory must be available to load the model.

First ensure that it is working on CPU (See First steps).
Ensure that you have a compatible cuda installation with cuda 11.x or 12.x. ts_server needs the cuBLASLt library which is provided in the cuda toolkit.
Then try to use the GPU with the ts_test utility:
```
  ./ts_test --cuda -m gpt2_117M.bin g "The Linux kernel is"
```
If you get an error such as:
```
  Could not load: ./libnc_cuda.so
```
it means that cuda is not properly installed or that there is a mismatch between the installed cuda version and the one ts_server was compiled with. You can use:
```
  ldd ./libnc_cuda.so
```
to check that all the required cuda libraries are present on your system.
Then edit the ts_server.cfg configuration to enable GPU support by uncommenting
```
  cuda: true
```
and run the server:
```
  ./ts_server ts_server.cfg
```

Assuming you have curl, Try one request:

  curl http://localhost:8080/v1/engines/gpt2_117M/completions \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"prompt": "The Linux kernel is", "max_tokens": 100}'

You can use the integrated GUI by exploring with your browser:
```
http://localhost:8080
```
Depending on the amount of memory available on your GPU, you can set the memory parameter in ts_server.cfg to limit the amount of memory used by the server. It is usually necessary to use a few gigabytes less that maximum available amount of GPU memory.

2.2 Windows

2.2.1 First steps

The TextSynth Server works only on x86 CPUs supporting AVX2 (all Intel CPUs since 2013 support it).

Extract the ZIP archive, launch the shell and go into its directory:
```
  cd ts_server-##version##
```
when ##version## is the version of the program.
Download one small example model such as gpt2_117M.bin from the ts_server web page.
Use it to generate text with the "ts_test" utility:
```
  ts_test -m gpt2_117M.bin g "The Linux kernel is"
```
The -T option can be used to use more or less CPU cores (the default is the number of physical cores).
Start the server:
```
  ts_server ts_server.cfg
```
You can edit the ts_server.cfg JSON configuration file if you want to use another model.
Assuming you installed curl (you can download it from https://curl.se/windows/), try one request:
```
  curl http://localhost:8080/v1/engines/gpt2_117M/completions \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"prompt": "The Linux kernel is", "max_tokens": 100}'
```
The full request syntax is documented at https://textsynth.com/documentation.html.
You can use the integrated GUI by exploring with your browser:
```
http://localhost:8080
```

Now you are ready to load a larger model and to use it from your application.

2.2.2 GPU usage

First ensure that it is working on CPU (see the previous section).
Ensure that you have a compatible cuda installation with cuda 11.x or 12.x. ts_server needs the cuBLASLt library which is provided in the cuda toolkit.
Then try to use the GPU with the ts_test utility:
```
  ./ts_test --cuda -m gpt2_117M.bin g "The Linux kernel is"
```
If you get an error such as:
```
  Could not load: libnc_cuda-12.dll (error=126)
```
it means that cuda is not properly installed.
Then edit the ts_server.cfg configuration to enable GPU support by uncommenting
```
  cuda: true
```
and run the server:
```
  ./ts_server ts_server.cfg
```

Assuming you have curl, Try one request:

  curl http://localhost:8080/v1/engines/gpt2_117M/completions \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"prompt": "The Linux kernel is", "max_tokens": 100}'

You can use the integrated GUI by exploring with your browser:
```
http://localhost:8080
```
Depending on the amount of memory available on your GPU, you can set the memory parameter in ts_server.cfg to limit the amount of memory used by the server. It is usually necessary to use a few gigabytes less that maximum available amount of GPU memory.

3 Utilities

3.1 Text processing (`ts_test`)

3.1.1 Text generation

./ts_test --cuda -m gpt2_117M.bin g "Hello, my name is"

When using a CPU, remove the --cuda option.

3.1.2 Translation

./ts_test --cuda -m m2m100_1_2B_q8.bin translate en fr "The dispute \
focuses on the width of seats provided on long-haul flights for \
economy passengers."

assuming you downloaded the m2m100_1_2B_q8.bin model.

3.1.3 Short text compression and decompression

./ts_test --cuda -m gpt2_117M.bin cs "Hello, how are you ?"

./ts_test --cuda ds "##msg##"

where ##msg## is the compressed message.

3.1.4 Perplexity computation

The perplexity over a text file can be used to evaluate models. The text file is first tokenized, then cut in sequences of tokens. The default sequence length is the maximum context length of the model, use the -l option to change it. Then the log probabilities are averaged over a range of context positions and displayed as perplexity.

./ts_test --cuda -m mistral_7B.bin perplexity wiki.test.raw
ctx_len=8192, n_seq=40
START   END PERPLEXITY
    0   256      9.746
  256   512      5.758
  512  1024      5.072
 1024  2048      4.984
 2048  4096      4.934
 4096  8192      4.689
    0  8192      4.952

The llama_perplexity command evaluates the perplexity using the same algorithm as the perplexity utility in llama.cpp so that comparisons can be made. The default context length is 512.

./ts_test --cuda -m mistral_7B.bin llama_perplexity wiki.test.raw
ctx_len=512, start=256, n_seq=642
 #SEQ PERPLEXITY
  641     5.6946

3.2 Text to image (`ts_sd`)

./ts_sd --cuda -m sd_v1.4.bin -o out.jpg "an astronaut riding a horse"

assuming you downloaded sd_v1.4.bin.

When using a CPU, remove the --cuda option.

3.3 Chat (`ts_chat`)

./ts_chat --cuda -m llama2_7B_chat_q4.bin

assuming you downloaded llama2_7B_chat_q4.bin.

When using a CPU, remove the --cuda option.

During the chat, some commands are available. Use /h during the chat to have some help. Type Ctrl-C once to stop the output and twice to quit.

3.4 Speech to text transcription (`ts_audiototext`)

./ts_audiototext --cuda -m whisper_large_v3_q8.bin -o out.json audiofile.mp3

assuming you downloaded whisper_large_v3_q8.bin and that audiofile.mp3 is the audio file to be transcripted. out.json contains the transcripted text.

When using a CPU, remove the --cuda option.

3.5 Model Weight Conversion

TextSynth Server uses a specific file format to store the weights of the models. Python scripts are provided in scripts/ to convert model checkpoints to the TextSynth format. The tokenizer is now included in the model file. For backward compatibility, tokenizer files are provided in the tokenizer/ directory.

The script hf_model_convert.py should be used when converting from a Hugging Face model.

Example to convert Llama2 weights from Hugging Face to TextSynth:

python hf_model_convert.py --tokenizer llama_vocab.txt model_dir llama2.bin

where:

model_dir is the directory containing the config.json and pytorch_model*.bin files.
llama_vocab.txt is a ts_server tokenizer file from the tokenizer/ directory. The tokenizer file can also be extracted from an existing model with:
```
./ncdump -o llama3_vocab.txt llama3_8B_q4.bin tokenizer
```
The optional option --chat_template can be used to provide the chat template. The chat template is used to generate the prompt from the conversation history in the chat remote API and in the ts_chat utility. The following chat templates are currently available:

rwkv

Using Bob: and Alice: prompts.

vicuna

Using USER: and ASSISTANT: prompts.

redpajama_incite

Using <human>: and <bot>: prompts.

llama2

Using [INST] and [/INST] prompts.

llama3

Using <|start_header_id|>user<|end_header_id|> and <|start_header_id|>assistant<|end_header_id|> prompts.

phi3

qwen2

3.6 Model Weight Quantization

With the ncconvert utility, it is possible to quantize the model weights to 8, 4 or 3 bits. Quantization reduces the GPU memory usage and increases the inference speed. 8 bit quantization yields a negligible loss. 4 bit quantization yields a very small loss. 3 bit quantization currently only works on a GPU.

Examples:

8 bit quantization:

./ncconvert -q bf8 pythia_deduped_160M.bin pythia_deduped_160M_q8.bin

4 bit quantization:

./ncconvert -q bf4 pythia_deduped_160M.bin pythia_deduped_160M_q4.bin

4 TS Server Configuration

The file ts_server.cfg provides an example of configuration.

4.1 Syntax

The syntax is similar to JSON with a few modifications:

property names can be unquoted
```
{ property: 1 }
```
Multi-line and single line C style comments are accepted

4.2 Configuration parameters

cuda

Optional boolean (default = false). If true, CUDA (Nvidia GPU support) is enabled.

device_index

Optional integer (default = 0). Select the GPU device when using several GPUs. Use the nvidia-smi utility to list the available devices.

n_threads

Optional integer. When using a CPU, select the number of threads. It is set by default to the number of physical cores.

full_memory

Optional boolean (default = true). When using a GPU, ts_server reserves by default all the GPU memory for better efficiency. This parameter disables this behavior so that the GPU memory is allocated on demand.

max_memory

Optional integer (default = 0). If non zero, limit the consumed GPU memory to this value by pausing the HTTP requests until there is enough memory.

Since there is some overhead when handling the requests, it is better to set a value a few GB lower than the amount of total GPU memory.

kv_cache_max_count

Optional integer (default = 0). See the kv_cache_size parameter.

kv_cache_size

Optional integer (default = 0). The KV cache is used by the chat endpoint to store the context of the conversation to accelerate the inference. kv_cache_size sets the maximum KV cache memory in bytes. kv_cache_max_count sets the maximum number of cached entries.

The cache is enabled if kv_cache_max_count or kv_cache_size is not zero. When the cache is enabled, a zero value for either parameter means infinite.

kv_cache_cpu

Optional boolean (default = true). Select whether the KV cache is kept in the CPU memory (slower) or on the cuda device.

streaming_timeout

Optional integer (default = 100). When streaming completions, specifies the minimum time in ms between partial outputs.

models

Array of objects. Each element defines a model that is served. The following parameters are defined:

name: String. Name (ID) of the model in the HTTP requests.
filename: String. Filename of the model. You can use the conversion scripts to create one from Pytorch checkpoints if necessary.
draft_model: Optional string. Filename of a smaller model used to accelerate inference (speculative sampling). The draft model must use the same tokenizer as the large model.
sps_k_max: Optional integer. When using speculative sampling, specify the maximum number of tokens that is predicted by the draft model. The optimal value needs to be determined by experimentation. It is usually 3 or 4.
cpu_offload: Optional boolean (default = false). If true, the model is loaded in CPU memory and run on the GPU. This mode is interesting when the model does not fit the CPU. Performance is still good for very large batch sizes.

Note: the free version only accepts one model definition.

local_port

Integer. TCP port on which the HTTP server listens to.

bind_addr

Optional string (default = "0.0.0.0"). Set the IP address on which the server listens to. Use "127.0.0.1" if you want to accept local connections only.

tls

Optional boolean (default = false). If true, HTTPS (TLS) connections are accepted instead of HTTP ones.

tls_cert_file

Optional string. If TLS is enabled, the certificate (PEM format) must be provided with this parameter.

tls_cert_file

Optional string. If TLS is enabled, the private key of the certificate (PEM format) must be provided with this parameter.

log_start

Optional boolean (default = false). Print "Started." on the console when the server has loaded all the models and is ready to accept connections.

gui

Optional boolean (default = false). If true, enable a Graphical User Interface in addition to the remote API. It is available at the root URL, e.g. http://127.0.0.1:8080. The server just serves the files present in the gui/ directory. You can modify or add new files if needed.

log_filename

String. Set the filename where the logs are written. There is one line per connection. The fields are:

date and time (ISO format)
source IP address
HTTP method
URI
posted JSON

from_proxy

Optional boolean (default = true). If true, use the X-Forwarded-For header if available to determine the source IP address in the logs. It is useful to have the real IP address of a client when a proxy is used.

4.3 JSON endpoints

The server provides the following endpoints.

v1/engines/{model_id}/completions

Text completion.

Complete documentation at https://textsynth.com/documentation.html.

See api_examples/completion.py to have an example in Python.

v1/engines/{model_id}/chat

Chat based completion. Complete documentation at https://textsynth.com/documentation.html.

v1/engines/{model_id}/translate

Translation.

Complete documentation at https://textsynth.com/documentation.html.

See api_examples/translate.py to have an example in Python.

v1/engines/{model_id}/logprob

Log probability computation.

Complete documentation at https://textsynth.com/documentation.html.

v1/engines/{model_id}/tokenize

Tokenization.

Complete documentation at https://textsynth.com/documentation.html.

v1/engines/{model_id}/text_to_image

Text to image.

Complete documentation at https://textsynth.com/documentation.html.

See api_examples/sd.py to have an example in Python.

v1/engines/{model_id}/transcript

Speech to text transcription. See api_examples/transcript.py to have an example in Python.

The content type of the posted data should be multipart/form-data and should contain two files with the following names:

json: contains the JSON request.
file: contains the audio file to transcript. FFmpeg is invoked by ts_server to convert the audio file to raw samples.

The JSON request contains the following properties:

language: String. The input ISO language code. The following languages are available: af, am, ar, as, az, ba, be, bg, bn, bo, br, bs, ca, cs, cy, da, de, el, en, es, et, eu, fa, fi, fo, fr, gl, gu, ha, haw, he, hi, hr, ht, hu, hy, id, is, it, ja, jw, ka, kk, km, kn, ko, la, lb, ln, lo, lt, lv, mg, mi, mk, ml, mn, mr, ms, mt, my, ne, nl, nn, no, oc, pa, pl, ps, pt, ro, ru, sa, sd, si, sk, sl, sn, so, sq, sr, su, sv, sw, ta, te, tg, th, tk, tl, tr, tt, uk, ur, uz, vi, yi, yo, yue, zh.

Additional parameters are available for testing or tuning:

num_beams: Optional integer, range: 2 to 5 (default = 5). Number of beams used for decoding.
condition_on_previous_text: Optional boolean (default = false). Condition the current frame on the previous text.
logprob_threshold: Option float (default = -1.0).
no_speech_threshold: Optional float (default = 0.6). Probability threshold of the no_speech token for no speech detection. The average log-probability of the generated tokens must also be below logprob_threshold.

A JSON object is returned containing the transcription. It contains the following properties:

text

String. Transcripted text.

segments

Array of objects containing the transcripted text segments with timestamps. Each segment has the following properties:

id: Integer. Segment ID.
start: Float. Start time in seconds.
end: Float. End time in seconds.
text: String. Transcripted text for this segment.

language

String. ISO language code.

duration

Float. Transcription duration in seconds.

v1/engines/{model_id}/embeddings

Compute the embeddings of a text. The JSON request contains the following properties:

input: String or array of strings. Several input texts can be provided.

The returned JSON object contains the following properties:

object

String. value = "list".

data

Array of objects. Each object has the following properties:

object: String. value = "embedding".
index: Integer. Index in the array.
embedding: Array of floats. The embedding vector computed for the corresponding input text.

v1/memory_stats

Return a JSON object with the memory usage statistics. The following properties are available:

cur_memory: Integer. Current used memory in bytes (CPU or GPU memory).
max_memory: Integer. Maximum used memory in bytes since the last call (CPU or GPU memory).
kv_cache_count: Integer. Number of entries in the KV cache count.
kv_cache_size: Integer. CPU Memory in bytes used by the KV cache.

v1/models

Return the list of available models and their capabilities. It is used by the GUI.

TextSynth Server

Table of Contents

1 Introduction

2 Quick Start

2.1 Linux

2.1.1 First steps

2.1.2 GPU usage

2.2 Windows

2.2.1 First steps

2.2.2 GPU usage

3 Utilities

3.1 Text processing (ts_test)

3.1.1 Text generation

3.1.2 Translation

3.1.3 Short text compression and decompression

3.1.4 Perplexity computation

3.2 Text to image (ts_sd)

3.3 Chat (ts_chat)

3.4 Speech to text transcription (ts_audiototext)

3.5 Model Weight Conversion

3.6 Model Weight Quantization

4 TS Server Configuration

4.1 Syntax

4.2 Configuration parameters

4.3 JSON endpoints

3.1 Text processing (`ts_test`)

3.2 Text to image (`ts_sd`)

3.3 Chat (`ts_chat`)

3.4 Speech to text transcription (`ts_audiototext`)