Calamity 🌋

Calamity is a lightweight web app that wraps my custom (private) language model API to let me play and experiment with pretrained autoregressive language models easily. It runs Huggingface transformers wrappers of language models (currently EleutherAI/gpt-j-6B with 6B parameters, because it's cheaper than GPT-3/PaLM/Chinchilla/whatever else) behind a Flask / uWSGI API on the backend, and a Torus/Oak-based frontend that wraps the API. The backend lives in ./services, and the frontend + frontend server in ./src.

The architecture here is a little weird. There are two independent web apps: the model and API server, and the web app that wraps and calls the API and serves the client user interface. It's designed this way so that the API itself can be reused across other apps in my personal infrastructure, some of which aren't public yet. The current GPT-J-6B configuration requires about 60GB of RAM to fully load the model and 20-25GB to serve inference.

I personally run it on a reasonably-specced DigitalOcean VM behind an Nginx reverse proxy. Both the backend API service and the web app frontend run as systemd daemons. Currently, the API only lets the client customize generated sequence length, number, and the eos_token that marks the end of text generation, but I might add other parameters like temperature down the road.

Development

Calamity is a web app written with Oak. To run and build Calamity, you'll need to install the oak binary.

Calamity's development is managed through a Makefile:

• make serve (default when just make is run) starts the web server at src/main.oak
• make build or make b builds the frontend from src/app.js.oak
• make watch or make w runs the frontend build while watching files for changes (using entr)
• make fmt or make f re-formats all changed files tracked by Git. To format all files from scratch, run something like oak fmt **/*.oak --fix.