EPICURE Hackathon: Code Optimisation for HPC and AI Workloads
Start
09:00 (CEST)
2026/10/07
End
6:00 (CEST)
2026/10/09
Location
ACC Cyfronet AGH, Kraków, Poland & Online
EPICURE Hackathon: Code Optimisation for HPC and AI Workloads
7–9 October 2026 | ACC Cyfronet AGH, Kraków, Poland
Following the success of the Porto edition, the EPICURE Hackathon returns for its fifth edition. Building on EPICURE’s experience supporting around 240 projects across Europe, this three-day, hands-on event brings together developers, researchers, and HPC and AI users to tackle real performance challenges on Europe’s most powerful supercomputers.
This edition broadens its scope to cover both traditional scientific computing and AI workloads, with a strong focus on code optimisation, profiling, and scaling across CPUs and GPUs. Whether you want to speed up your simulation code or make your machine learning pipeline run efficiently at scale, this hackathon is for you.
From performance challenge to practical progress
Modern scientific and AI applications increasingly depend on complex computing environments. Achieving good performance requires more than access to powerful hardware: applications must be carefully profiled, adapted and optimised for the architectures on which they run.
During the EPICURE Hackathon, teams will have the opportunity to:
- -Analyse the performance of their applications and workflows;
- -Identify computational, memory, communication and data movement bottlenecks;
- -Improve CPU, GPU and multi-node performance;
- -Optimise AI training and inference workloads;
- -Explore parallelisation, profiling and scaling techniques;
- -Receive targeted guidance from experienced HPC and AI specialists;
- -Exchange knowledge with other teams from across the European computing community.
The emphasis is on practical work, measurable progress and solutions that teams can continue developing after the event.
Bring your own code
Bring your own application or AI workload and work on the challenges that matter to your team.
Together with EPICURE mentors, participants will define clear technical objectives and work on topics such as profiling, parallelisation, GPU acceleration, memory optimisation, data pipelines, distributed training and application scaling.
Projects may include:
- -Scientific and engineering applications;
- -Simulation and modelling codes;
- -Machine learning and deep learning workloads;
- -AI training and inference pipelines;
- -Hybrid HPC and AI workflows;
- -Data-intensive scientific applications;
- -Code porting and performance optimisation.
Mentoring starts before the hackathon
This edition, collaboration begins before the main event.
One week before the hackathon, selected teams will join an online kick-off and matchmaking session. This initial meeting will give participants the opportunity to:
- -Meet their assigned mentors;
- -Introduce their projects and technical challenges;
- -Connect with fellow participants;
- -Discuss objectives and expected outcomes;
- -Share relevant technical information;
- -Identify initial bottlenecks and priorities;
- -Agree on the first steps before the hands-on sessions begin.
Starting the mentoring process earlier will allow teams and mentors to arrive at the hackathon with a shared understanding of the project and a clearer technical plan, making the three event days more focused and productive.
The hackathon journey
Online team and mentor kick-off, project introductions and initial technical assessment.
Intensive hands-on optimisation, technical sessions, mentor consultations and collaborative problem-solving.
Teams present their progress, technical findings, implemented improvements and recommended next steps.
Why join?
Bring an application, model or workflow that matters to your research or organisation and use the hackathon to move it forward.
Receive practical guidance from specialists in code optimisation, GPU computing, profiling, parallel programming, scientific software and scalable AI.
Understand how your code interacts with modern CPU and GPU-based architectures and identify opportunities to improve efficiency and scalability.
Meet developers, researchers, infrastructure specialists and EuroHPC project teams working on related computational challenges.
The objective is not only to experiment during the event, but also to help each team define concrete improvements and realistic next steps for its application.
Who should apply?
The EPICURE Hackathon is aimed at:
- -Scientific software developers;
- -Researchers using computational methods;
- -HPC application teams;
- -Machine learning and AI engineers;
- -Teams developing training or inference workloads;
- -Research infrastructures and technical support teams;
- -EuroHPC project teams;
- -Organisations preparing applications for larger-scale computing environments.
Participants should have an existing code, model or workflow and a clearly identifiable performance, portability or scalability challenge.
Applications from different scientific disciplines, technology areas and levels of HPC experience are welcome.
A hybrid and collaborative event
The hackathon will take place at ACC Cyfronet AGH in Kraków, Poland.
Both onsite and remote participants will be part of the same collaborative programme, including technical sessions, hands-on work, mentor interactions, team updates and final presentations.
Ready to accelerate your project?
Bring your application, your performance challenge and your ambition to scale.
Join the EPICURE Hackathon and work alongside HPC and AI experts to turn bottlenecks into practical improvements.
