To deploy a custom foundation model for inferencing with watsonx.ai, you must upload the model to a cloud object storage. You can use the bucket in the IBM Cloud Object Storage that is associated with your deployment space or an external cloud storage.
Downloading models from public repositories
You can use public model repositories to download foundation models. Public model repositories might require you to set up an account before you download models from them.
For example, you can use Hugging Face, a public model repository, to download custom foundation models for your use case. You must set up a Hugging Face account to download the model from Hugging Face.
Downloading a model
These steps demonstrate how to download a custom foundation model by using a Hugging Face model. Follow these steps to download a custom foundation model by using the Hugging Face command-line interface:
-
Install the
huggingface-cli
package withpip
:pip install -U "huggingface_hub[cli]"
-
Check that the huggingface-cli is correctly set up:
huggingface-cli --help
-
Configure the required environment variables:
export HF_TOKEN="<your Hugging Face token>" export MODEL_NAME="<name of the model>" export MODEL_DIR="<directory to download the model to>"
-
Set up a directory on your local disk to download the model to:
mkdir ${MODEL_DIR}
-
Log in to Hugging Face command-line interface and download the model:
huggingface-cli login --token ${HF_TOKEN} huggingface-cli download ${MODEL_NAME} --local-dir ${MODEL_DIR} --cache-dir ${MODEL_DIR}
Converting a model to the required format
Before you add a model to object storage, you must make sure that your model is compatible with the Text Generation Inference (TGI) standard and is built with a supported model architecture and model type. For more information, see Planning to deploy a custom foundation model.
If your model was fine-tuned with InstructLab, conversion to the safetensors
format might not be possible:
- Models that were fine-tuned in Linux environment require conversion.
- Models that were fine-tuned on a Mac can't be converted.
- Models that were fine-tuned and saved to the
.gguf
format (in any environment) cannot be converted.
To convert a model that was fine-tuned with InstructLab, use the code in This repository to convert your model.
For all the other models, if your model is not in the safetensors
format and does not contain the tokenizer.json
file, follow these steps to convert your model to the required format. Otherwise, skip to the section
for Setting up cloud object storage and adding the model.
-
Install
podman
Desktop on your local machine. -
Pull the TGIS image:
export TGIS_IMAGE="quay.io/modh/text-generation-inference:rhoai-2.8-58cac74" podman pull ${TGIS_IMAGE}
-
Convert the model:
container_id=$(podman run -itd --privileged -u 0 -v ${MODEL_DIR}:/tmp ${TGIS_IMAGE} tail -f /dev/null) podman exec -it ${container_id} bash -c 'export MODEL_PATH=/tmp ; text-generation-server convert-to-safetensors ${MODEL_PATH} ; text-generation-server convert-to-fast-tokenizer ${MODEL_PATH}'
Uploading the model to cloud object storage
You can upload your model to a bucket in the IBM Cloud Object Storage or any other storage buckets, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Here are some of the cloud object storages offered by IBM:
Uploading the model to IBM Cloud Object Storage by using the IBM Aspera Transfer SDK
Prerequisites:
- Download the IBM Aspera Transfer SDK. Click this link.
- Set these environment variables:
- Path to IBM Aspera Transfer SDK as the
path-to-aspera
- Path to the folder with the model as
path-to-model-folder
- Bucket name to transfer the model to as
bucket-name
- Your cloud object storage API key as
api-key
- Your cloud object storage service instance ID as
cos-service-instance-id
- Your cloud object storage service endpoint as
cos-service-endpoint
- Path to IBM Aspera Transfer SDK as the
Use this script to upload your model to IBM Cloud Object Storage by using the IBM Aspera Transfer SDK:
import grpc
import sys
import time, subprocess
import json
import os.path
import os.environ
import transfer_pb2 as transfer_manager
import transfer_pb2_grpc as transfer_manager_grpc
path_to_aspera = os.environ['path-to-aspera']
sys.path.append(f'{path_to_aspera}/connectors/python')
def start_aspera_daemon():
config_path = f'/{path_to_aspera}/config/asperatransferd.json'
daemon_path = f'/{path_to_aspera}/bin/asperatransferd'
# Start the daemon
process = subprocess.Popen([daemon_path, '--config', config_path])
print(f"Started Aspera Transfer SDK daemon with PID {process.pid}")
time.sleep(5) # Increased wait time for the daemon to start properly
return process
def run():
try:
# create a connection to the transfer manager daemon
client = transfer_manager_grpc.TransferServiceStub(grpc.insecure_channel('localhost:55002'))
# create transfer spec
transfer_spec = {
"session_initiation":{
"icos":{
"bucket": os.environ['bucket-name'],
"api_key": os.environ['cos-api-key'],
"ibm_service_instance_id": os.environ['cos-service-instance-id'],
"ibm_service_endpoint": os.environ['cos-service-endpoint'] # example: https://s3.us-south.cloud-object-storage.appdomain.cloud
}
},
"direction": "send",
"title": "COS Upload",
"assets": {
"destination_root": "/model",
"paths": [
{
"source": os.environ['path-to-model-folder']
}
]
}
}
transfer_spec = json.dumps(transfer_spec)
# create a transfer request
transfer_request = transfer_manager.TransferRequest(
transferType=transfer_manager.FILE_REGULAR,
config=transfer_manager.TransferConfig(),
transferSpec=transfer_spec
)
# send start transfer request to transfer manager daemon
try:
transfer_response = client.StartTransfer(transfer_request)
transfer_id = transfer_response.transferId
print(f"Transfer started with id {transfer_id}")
except grpc.RpcError as e:
print(f"Error starting transfer: {e.code()}: {e.details()}")
return
# monitor transfer status
try:
# Monitor transfer status
while True:
response = client.MonitorTransfers(
transfer_manager.RegistrationRequest(
filters=[transfer_manager.RegistrationFilter(
transferId=[transfer_id]
)]))
for transfer_info in response:
print(f"Transfer info: {transfer_info}")
# Check transfer status in response
status = transfer_info.status
if status == transfer_manager.FAILED or status == transfer_manager.COMPLETED:
print(f"Transfer finished with status {status}")
return
# Wait before polling again
time.sleep(5)
except grpc.RpcError as e:
print(f"Error monitoring transfer: {e.code()}: {e.details()}")
except Exception as e:
print(f"Unexpected error: {str(e)}", file=sys.stderr)
if __name__ == '__main__':
# Start the Aspera Transfer SDK daemon
daemon_process = start_aspera_daemon()
# Run the file transfer
run()
# Optionally, stop the Aspera daemon after transfer
daemon_process.terminate()
print("Aspera Transfer SDK daemon stopped")
Uploading the model to IBM Cloud Object Storage by using tools that are provided by third parties
You can use third-party software to upload your model to IBM Cloud Object Storage.
Follow these example steps to upload your model to IBM Cloud Object Storage by using the Amazon Web Services command-line interface:
-
Install the Amazon Web Services command-line interface with
pip
:pip install awscli
-
Set the required environment variables:
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="<your access key>" export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="<your secret access key>" export ENDPOINT="<s3 endpoint URL>" export BUCKET_NAME="<name of the bucket to upload the model>" MODEL_FOLDER=${MODEL_NAME//\//-} # The name of the created folder is based on model name. export MODEL_FOLDER=${MODEL_FOLDER//./-} # Just in case, we're removing slashes and dots from it.
-
Add the model to the IBM Cloud Object Storage bucket by using the Amazon Web Services command-line interface:
aws --endpoint-url ${ENDPOINT} s3 cp ${MODEL_DIR} s3://${BUCKET_NAME}/${MODEL_FOLDER}/ --recursive --follow-symlinks
Next step
Parent topic: Planning to deploy a custom foundation model