The Hackathon on Code optimisation for heterogeneous HPC environments is a hands-on, collaborative initiative for developers, researchers, and HPC users interested in improving application performance across modern heterogeneous architectures. Participants will work on real optimisation challenges, explore advanced techniques for CPUs, GPUs and accelerators, and exchange expertise with peers from across the European HPC community.

 

The event will take place from April 27 to 29, 2026, and will be held in a hybrid format (online and on-site) at INESC TEC, Porto, Portugal.

 

On-site attendance is limited to a maximum of 30 participants.

 

 

 

Why join the hackathon?

 

 

 

Registration

 

Registration is free but mandatory. Please register here by April 15, 2026.

 

 

 

Agenda

 

 

 

 

Keynote Speakers

 

Bernardo Malaca

Bernardo Malaca holds a PhD in Physics Engineering and has over four years of experience in high-performance computing (HPC) user support. For the past 1.5 years, he have been working on the Deucalion supercomputer, supporting users and workflows on a peta-scale HPC system. He also offers technical support at the BSC AI Factory, where Portuguese small and medium-scale companies ask for resources and guidance for AI adoption.

 

 

Uwe Wössner

Uwe Wössner has headed the Visualisation Department at the High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) since 2004. He holds a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Stuttgart (2009) and is a guest professor and lecturer at TU Vienna (Austria) and HSR Rapperswil (Switzerland). He is also the co-founder of VirCinity GmbH and has received international distinctions, including the HPC Challenge (2003) and the HPC Bandwidth Challenge (2006). His research focuses on collaborative virtual environments for scientific visualisation, 3D user interfaces, interaction techniques for computational steering, and the use of VR and AR in BIM. He also serves on the programme committees of several conferences related to VR and 3D user interfaces, including IEEE VR, IEEE VIS and EuroVR.

 

 

Ziyad AlBanoby

Ziyad AlBanoby studied at Alexandria University in Alexandria, Egypt, earning his degree in Computer and Communications Engineering. He specializes in CUDA software optimization and porting, focusing on algorithms on GPU. He worked for two years at Brightskies Inc. and, in 2024, joined the High-Level Support Team at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.

 

 

 

 

Mentors

 

During the hackathon, participants will be supported by a team of mentors with experience in HPC and scientific computing.

 

Alícia Oliveira

Alicia Soares Oliveira holds a Master’s degree in Medical Informatics (2024) and a Bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Engineering (2022) from the University of Minho. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Informatics at the same university. Alicia works as a Machine Learning Engineer at INESC TEC, where she contributes to the EPICURE project, supporting the optimisation of scientific applications for European HPC systems.

 

 

Bernardo Malaca

Bernardo Malaca holds a PhD in Physics Engineering and has over four years of experience in high-performance computing (HPC) user support. For the past 1.5 years, he have been working on the Deucalion supercomputer, supporting users and workflows on a peta-scale HPC system. He also offers technical support at the BSC AI Factory, where Portuguese small and medium-scale companies ask for resources and guidance for AI adoption.

 

 

Francisco Vide

Francisco Vide graduated with an integrated master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto. He has been working in Computational Fluid Dynamics since his master’s studies, later continuing in this field during a research master’s at the von Kármán Institute for Fluid Dynamics and through his PhD in Mechanical Engineering at FEUP. He is currently a member of the support team for the Deucalion supercomputer.

 

 

Isabel Rio-Torto

Isabel Rio-Torto obtained her Master’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto in 2019. She is currently awaiting the defence of her PhD in Computer Science at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto, with a thesis titled “Weakly Supervised Multimodal Explanations for Medical Image Classification.”

 

Alongside her role as a researcher at INESC TEC, she is an Invited Teaching Assistant at FEUP and FCUP, teaching C programming, Computer Vision, and Artificial Intelligence. Isabel has extensive experience using HPC systems, particularly for GPU-based AI training and inference in PyTorch, including work with Large (Vision) Language Models.

 

 

Miguel Peixoto

Miguel Peixoto leads the systems administration team of the Deucalion supercomputer and has been involved in the project since its pre-production phase. He has extensive experience in the implementation, operation and optimisation of large-scale HPC clusters.

 

At INESC TEC, he manages and supports HPC clusters used by scientific teams across multiple scientific domains, ensuring the availability, performance and efficiency of computational resources. His work combines systems administration, advanced user support and close collaboration with researchers to maximise the effective use of high-performance computing environments.