Coming to Chicago for Supercomputing 2026? Start the week by building.
- Friday, November 13 to Sunday, November 15, 2026
- 5:00 PM CT Friday to 4:00 PM CT Sunday
- Fulton Market District, Chicago
The CIQ Supercomputing Local AI Hackathon brings together 20 teams for a deeply technical, hands-on AI build weekend immediately ahead of Supercomputing.
Each team will get access to two Lenovo ThinkStation PGXs—powered by the NVIDIA GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip—to use throughout the weekend, connected into a multi-node environment and orchestrated through Fuzzball.
The challenge: build a real AI workload that actually takes advantage of the full cluster.
How to Participate
This is an intermediate, technical hackathon built for the AI and HPC community coming to Chicago for SC26, limited to a maximum of 20 teams. Once we reach capacity, additional applicants will be placed on a waitlist and notified if a spot becomes available.
Application Guidelines:
- You must be able to attend the event in person.
- This event is open to individuals 18 years of age or older.
- Technical Expertise: Experience working with multi-node systems and HPC environments. No prior Fuzzball experience is required; onboarding support will be provided.
- Team Size: Minimum 3 members, maximum 5 members.
- Priority: Full team applications will be prioritized over individual applications. We highly encourage you to form and apply as a team.
- Individuals: If you apply as an individual, team formation will happen the first day of the event. If accepted, you will be required to compete with your assigned team.
- Note: All project code must be written during the hackathon, beginning at kickoff.
Challenge Tracks
Over one weekend, teams will build, benchmark, and demonstrate an AI or HPC workload running across their multi-node cluster.
By Sunday, your team should be able to demonstrate both what you built and what the additional compute actually unlocked.
- 1
Multi-Node Training
Build a training or fine-tuning workload that takes advantage of compute across multiple nodes.
- 2
Inference at Scale
Explore multi-node inference for greater throughput, concurrency, model capacity, or performance.
- 3
Scientific AI
Apply distributed AI and accelerated computing to a scientific or research workload.
- 4
Cluster & Scheduling
Build around orchestration, scheduling, resource allocation, utilization, or multi-node infrastructure.
What You Can Win
We're sending the top 3 teams straight from the hackathon into Supercomputing 2026.
- SC26 conference passes
- Lenovo ThinkStation PGX ($6,000 ABV)
- Official prize moment + team photo at the CIQ x NVIDIA booth during SC26
- NVIDIA Developer Livestream feature
Preparation Resources
Start Building on DGX Spark
Find instructions and examples to run AI workloads on the NVIDIA GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip.
NVIDIA Build Model Endpoints
Access low-latency, high-accuracy endpoints designed for agentic systems.
Apply
Having trouble with the form? Apply on Luma
This event is closed to all CIQ, NVIDIA, VAST Data, Lenovo, Cambridge Computer, and Drive Capital employees.
