Real AI. Real clusters. Built for SC26. Coming to Chicago for Supercomputing 2026? Start the week by building. 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. Fuzzball: Understand how to set up an AI model in v4.3 of Fuzzball.
This event is closed to all CIQ, NVIDIA, VAST Data, Lenovo, Cambridge Computer, and Drive Capital employees.
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