System requirements

You install a self-hosted instance of Tonic Textual on either:

• A VM or server that runs Linux and on which you have superuser access.

• A local machine that runs Mac, Windows, or Linux.

Application server or cluster requirements

At minimum, we recommend that the server or cluster that you deploy Textual to has access to the following resources:

• Nvidia GPU, 16GB GPU RAM. We recommend at least 6GB GPU RAM for each textual-ml worker.

If you only use a CPU and not a GPU, then we recommend an M5.2xLarge. However, without GPU, performance is significantly slower.

GPU considerations

The number of words per second that Textual processes depends on many factors, including:

• The hardware that runs the textual-ml container

• The number of workers that are assigned to the textual-ml container

• The auxiliary model, if any, that is used in the textual-ml container.

To optimize the throughput of and the cost to use Textual, we recommend that the textual-ml container runs on modern hardware with GPU compute. If you use AWS, we recommend a g5 instance with 1 GPU.

Application database

The Textual application database is a PostgreSQL database that stores the dataset and Textual configuration. If you did not configure an S3 bucket to store files that you upload into a dataset, then the application database also contains those uploaded files.

External database server

The Textual application database is an external database that is hosted on a separate server.

For the PostgreSQL server, we recommend a minimum of an RDS t3.small on AWS, with at least 2GB RAM, 2 vCPU, and 100 GB of storage.

To prevent the loss of Textual metadata, keep regular backups of the PostgreSQL instance.

PostgreSQL version

For the Textual application database, the current minimum supported version is PostgreSQL 14+.

You should keep your PostgreSQL version relatively up-to-date with the current PostgreSQL LTS.

Tonic.ai might periodically conduct a campaign to request updates of self-hosted PostgreSQL instances before a scheduled update in the minimum supported version.

Database user permissions

The user credentials that you provide to Textual for the application database must have permission to create tables, insert, and select.

Setting up Nvidia GPU for Textual

To use GPU resources:

• Ensure that the correct Nvidia drivers are installed for your instance.

• If you use Kubernetes to deploy Textual, follow the instructions in the NVIDIA GPU operator documentation.

  If you use Minikube, then use the instructions in Using NVIDIA GPUs with Minikube.

• If you use Docker Compose to deploy Textual, follow these steps to install the nvidia-container-runtime.