AIRC (pronounced Eric)

AI is Really Cool

NOTE: If running on an Intel Arc A series graphics processor, fp64 is not supported and may need to either be emulated or have the model quantized.

This project provides container definitions that will provide PyTorch 2.6 with Intel's LLM project. In addition, it provides a small local chat server and an IRC client to provide a chat bot.

Installation

This project uses docker containers to build. As this was originally written to work on an Intel Arc B580 (Battlemage), it requires a kernel that supports that hardware, such as the one documented at Intel Graphics Preview, which runs in Ubuntu Oracular (24.10)..

NOTE: You need 'docker compose' installed. See Install Docker Engine on Ubuntu

Want to run under WSL2? No can do...

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000093216/graphics/processor-graphics.html

The A- and B-series discrete GPUs do not support SR-IOV, required for the GPU partitioning that Microsoft Windows uses in order to support GPU acceleration in WSL.

Building

NOTE: You need 'docker compose' installed. See Install Docker Engine on Ubuntu

git clone https://github.com/jketreno/airc
cd airc
docker compose build

Running

In order to download the models, you need to have a Hugging Face token. See https://huggingface.co/settings/tokens for information on obtaining a token.

Edit .env to add the following:

HF_ACCESS_TOKEN=<access token from huggingface>

NOTE: Models downloaded by most examples will be placed in the ./cache directory, which is bind mounted to the container.

AIRC

To launch the airc shell interactively, with the pytorch 2.6 environment loaded, use the default entrypoint to launch a shell:

docker compose run --rm airc shell

Once in the shell, you can then launch the model-server.py and then the airc.py client:

docker compose run --rm airc shell
src/airc.py --ai-server=http://localhost:5000 &
src/model-server.py

By default, src/airc.py will connect to irc.libera.chat on the airc-test channel. See python src/airc.py --help for options.

By separating the model-server into its own process, you can develop and tweak the chat backend without losing the IRC connection established by airc.

Jupyter

docker compose up jupyter -d

The default port for inbound connections is 8888 (see docker-compose.yml). $(pwd)/jupyter is bind mounted to /opt/juypter in the container, which is where notebooks will be saved by default.

To access the jupyter notebook, go to https://localhost:8888/jupyter.

Monitoring

You can run ze-monitor within the launched containers to monitor GPU usage.

containers=($(docker ps --filter "ancestor=airc" --format "{{.ID}}"))
if [[ ${#containers[*]} -eq 0 ]]; then
  echo "Running airc container not found."
else
  for container in ${containers[@]}; do
    echo "Container ${container} devices:"
    docker exec -it ${container} ze-monitor
  done
fi

If an airc container is running, you should see something like:

Container 5317c503e771 devices:
Device 1: 8086:A780 (Intel(R) UHD Graphics 770)
Device 2: 8086:E20B (Intel(R) Graphics [0xe20b])

You can then launch ze-monitor in that container specifying the device you wish to monitor:

docker exec -it 5317c503e771 ze-monitor --device 2