📌 About the Event

The NCSA/PSC Open Hackathon is an elite virtual “Bring Your Own Code” intensive, co-hosted by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) in collaboration with NVIDIA. This is a premier opportunity for research teams to take their existing real-world applications in HPC, AI/ML, or Quantum Computing and optimize them for massive data center architectures. Instead of a competition against others, this is a collaborative sprint where you work alongside dedicated expert mentors to smash computational bottlenecks and achieve significant performance speedups.

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ℹ️ Event Details

• Category: HPC, AI/ML, Quantum Computing, and Data Science
• Organizer: NCSA, PSC, NVIDIA, and OpenACC Organization
• Eligibility: Research teams (Students, Academics, and Industry Researchers)
• Open To: Global (Priority given to active/potential users of NCSA & PSC resources)
• Team Size: Minimum 3 members per team
• Effort Level: Extremely High (Intensive hands-on coding)
• Submission Type: Technical application describing your code, parallelization status, and goals

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📅 Important Dates

• Application Deadline: June 17, 2026
• Day 0 (Mentor Meeting): September 01, 2026
• Event Dates: September 8, 15, 16, and 17, 2026
• Mode: Fully Virtual

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🏆 Direct Benefits & Value

• World-Class Mentorship: Two dedicated mentors per team from NVIDIA or national supercomputing centers.
• Compute Resources: Access to some of the world’s most powerful GPU clusters for the duration of the event.
• Performance Gains: Direct assistance in porting to GPUs using OpenACC, CUDA, OpenMP, or specialized AI libraries.
• Collaboration: Networking with the global community of computational scientists.

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🎯 Target Tracks

• HPC Applications: Climate modeling, molecular dynamics, physics simulations, etc.
• AI/ML Workflows: Accelerating training and inference on large-scale datasets.
• Quantum Simulations: Optimization of quantum circuit simulators.

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📦 Participation Requirements

• Code Ownership: Teams must bring their own code (open-source preferred; license required).
• Commitment: All team members must be present and active for all 4 days of the hackathon.
• Profile: Teams should have a deep understanding of their application’s logic and computational hot-spots.