European AI Hackathon

Open Hackathons are multi-day, hands-on coding events that help developers and researchers accelerate, optimize, and scale their applications on a variety of data center architectures. Attendees work with dedicated mentors to identify and address data loading bottlenecks, parallelize training, and optimize AI pipelines for faster experimentation to realize performance gains and speedups.

The European AI Hackathon, starting 6 October and concluding 29 October 2026, targets small and medium-sized enterprise (SMEs), startups, industry practitioners, and researchers across Europe building AI-driven products and services. Teams benefit from personalized, expert guidance to take their AI workloads to the next level, and access to leadership-class compute resources.

Examples of AI projects include:

Agentic Contract Intelligence: Multi-agent pipelines that parse, risk-score, and redline contracts across languages and jurisdictions
Real-Time Energy Grid Balancing: Agentic systems running thousands of parallel simulations to autonomously balance distributed energy resources within live decision windows
Legacy Code Modernization: Fine-tuning open-weight code LLMs on COBOL/Fortran codebases with long-context windows to enable enterprise migration
Autonomous Quality Inspection: Vision models running high‑FPS inference to detect defects on production lines
Predictive Maintenance at Scale: Multimodal LLMs that integrate sensor logs, manuals, and historical failures to recommend interventions

These projects are illustrations, not constraints. Any AI workload that benefits from scaling, speed-up, and hands‑on expert guidance is welcome.

Applying teams should have a clear project that is ready to be further developed and scaled. Participating teams must be based in the EU and/or EuroHPC JU member countries. Please ensure that your team meets all prerequisites before you apply and use your company/institute email address in the application form.

This hackathon is co-organized by Austrian Scientific Computing (ASC), the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ), the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS), the Academic Computer Centre Cyfronet AGH (Cyfronet), OpenACC organization, and NVIDIA for AI Factory Austria AI:AT, HammerHAI, and Gaia AI Factory.

Location

This hybrid event will take place online and at
HLRS, University of Stuttgart
Nobelstraße 19
70569 Stuttgart, Germany
Location and nearby accommodations

Apply

Location

This hybrid event will take place online and at
HLRS, University of Stuttgart
Nobelstraße 19
70569 Stuttgart, Germany
Location and nearby accommodations

Start date

Oct 06, 2026
10:00

End date

Oct 29, 2026
17:00

Language

English

Entry level

Basic

Intermediate

Course subject areas

Bootcamp/Hackathon

Data in HPC / Deep Learning / Machine Learning

Topics

Artificial Intelligence

Python

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Prerequisites and content levels

Prerequisites

Teams are expected to be fluent with the code or project they bring to the event and motivated to make progress during the hackathon.
A minimum of 3 team members must participate throughout the entire event. Lack of complete participation will result in the entire team being excused.
All team members must be based in the EU or EuroHPC JU member countries.
Projects brought to the event are required to have a license attached and detailed in the application. Permissive-style Open Source License (e.g. BSD, MIT or Apache 2.0 license) are preferred as it is much easier for the hackathon organizer to pair your team with Mentors.

Here are some tips and guidelines on licenses:

Target audience

This course is intended for, but not limited to:

Small and medium-sized enterprise (SMEs), startups, industry practitioners, and researchers across Europe building AI-driven products and services.

Instructors

Main mentors: NVIDIA engineers and additional expert mentors will be announced soon.

Hybrid format

This hackathon will be held in a hybrid format.

Day 0 and Day 1 will take place virtually, while Days 2–4 will be held in a hybrid format, with participation possible online or at one of several on-site locations, including Stuttgart.
Applicants can select their preferred participation option in the registration form.
Further details on how to participate will be provided there.

Agenda

CE(S)T time zone

Day 0: 6th October 2026 // 10 AM - 1:00 PM (Virtual)

10:00 AM - 10:10 AM: Welcome
10:10 AM - 10:20 AM: Overview of the hackathon and expectations
10:20 AM - 10:30 AM: Review of AI Tools
10:30 AM - 11:30 AM: Introduction to NVIDIA® Nsight™ Tools
11:30 AM - 12:00 PM: Cluster overview
12:00 PM - 12:50 PM: Attendees work with their mentors in breakout rooms
12:50 PM - 01:00 PM: Mentor sync (Mentor breakout room)

Day 1: 13th October 2026 // 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM (Virtual)

09:00 AM - 11:00 AM: Team introduction presentations
11:00 AM - 11:15 AM: Mentor introductions
11:15 AM - 05:00 PM: Teams and mentors work in breakout rooms

Day 2: 27 October 2026 // 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM (Hybrid)

09:00 AM - 05:00 PM: Teams and mentors work in breakout rooms
10:00 AM - 11:00 AM: Daily SCRUMs: teams present for 5 minutes on daily progress
12:00 PM - 01:00 PM: Lunch Break

Day 3: 28 October 2026// 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM (Hybrid)

09:00 AM - 05:00 PM: Teams and mentors work in breakout rooms
10:00 AM - 11:00 AM: Daily SCRUMs: teams present for 5 minutes on daily progress
12:00 PM - 01:00 PM: Lunch Break

Day 4: 29 October 2026 // 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM (Hybrid)

09:00 AM - 03:00 PM: Teams and mentors work in breakout rooms
12:00 PM - 01:00 PM: Lunch Break
03:00 PM - 05:00 PM: Final team presentations

Registration information

Apply for this course via the button at the top of this page.

Please note that by clicking the “Apply” button, you will be redirected to Open Hackathons, an external website that is outside the HLRS area of responsibility.

Registration closes on August 6, 2026.

Late applications may still be accepted depending on course capacity.

Fees

This course is free of charge.

The following applies only to accepted participants according to the Prerequisites above.

Contact

Junghwa Lee (HLRS), phone 0711 685 87228, training(at)hlrs.de

Further courses and training team

See the training overview and the Supercomputing Academy pages.
See also information about the HLRS training department and staff.

HLRS Training Collaborations in HPC and AI

HLRS is part of the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS), together with JSC in Jülich and LRZ in Garching near Munich. SIDE is the German National Competence Centre (NCC) for High-Performance Computing. HLRS is also a member of the Baden-Württemberg initiative bwHPC.
Since 2025, HLRS has been coordinating one of the AI Factories of the EuroHPC JU: HammerHAI.

Acknowledgements

This event is offered as part of HammerHAI, Germany’s first AI Factory, which has a dedicated focus on industry, manufacturing, engineering, and research. HammerHAI provides AI resources and solutions, an upcoming AI-optimized supercomputer, and personalized expert support for AI users at all stages in the AI lifecycle. This project has received funding from the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking under grant agreement No. 101234027. This project is co-funded by the European Commission, the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR), the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts, the Bavarian State Ministry of Science and the Arts and the Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and Culture.