Infrastructure Background
This document aims to provide comprehensive information on the infrastructure and tooling used by researchers and developers in pursuit of the goals of the ABAIR project based out of the phonetics and speech laboratory in Trinity College, Dublin.
Migration to Cloud Infrastructure
In 2023 we officially outgrew the limited and dated server capacity we were running ourselves out of a 12U cabinet within the laboratory itself, and decided to begin renting server space in the 'cloud' in the form of a single dedicated server from Hetzner, a well-known German ISP and hosting provider.
This move was made at the recommendation of staff working within the lab as well as a recommendation by Trinity College's "Cloud First" policy following a consultation with the internal IT Services team.
Motivation for the Upgrade
The need arose when trying to identify bottlenecks which are holding back response times for our Synthesis API, and what we could do to alleviate some of those factors, the primary of which being the relative age of the CPU synthesising requests in production, a dated Xeon server which was not suited to task, aside from that the new server provided opportunities to modify tooling, and security for the projects in order to ensure data safety, integrity and compliance with data protection legislation.
Current Infrastructure and Outputs
At the time of writing the infrastructure is composed of one dedicated server hosted with Hetzner in Falkenstein, Germany as well as several servers hosted locally within the laboratory itself.
The products, so to speak, of the laboratory include, but are not limited to the following:
- Irish-Language Speech Synthesis
- Irish-Language Automated Speech Recognition (ASR)
- Accessibility Tools and Applications for the Irish Language
- Educational tools and platforms for Irish L2 or L1 learners.
- Open source tooling for building upon our work.
- APIs, Websites and Web Interfaces which interact with our other projects.