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.
• 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.

🔥 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.

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