Further information and application form can be found under https://www.openhackathons.org/s/siteevent/a0CUP00003yKxcX2AS/se000475 .
Contents
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.
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.
Language
English
Prices and Eligibility
The event is open and free of charge for people from academia and industry based in the EU or EuroHPC JU member countries.
Application
Please apply via https://www.openhackathons.org/s/siteevent/a0CUP00003yKxcX2AS/se000475 with your official e-mail address to prove your affiliation.
