Open Forum Discussion

The 2026 NCAR / NOAA / NLR Open Hackathon is now accepting applications.

The Open Hackathon, a hybrid event, is scheduled from Tuesday, May 5, to Thursday, May 7. Virtual introduction meetings will be held on Tuesday, April 21 and Tuesday, April 28, when teams will be first introduced with expert mentors from National Labs, the computational science community, and NVIDIA. The hybrid event will be held in Boulder, CO, at the campus of NSF NCAR's Mesa Laboratory, in partnership with NOAA and NLR (formerly NREL).

Open Hackathons are multi-day, intensive hands-on events designed to facilitate collaboration between domain scientists, computational scientists, and research software engineers. Researchers and computational scientists typically attend the Hackathon with goals to improve and optimize their HPC applications or explore and implement new software features for their research goals. This 2023 CISL News article details past experiences.

Teams of at least three members are encouraged to apply by Wednesday, February 4. Applications should include ongoing or new projects towards the goal of improving their software, such as by adding well-defined features, porting code to new architectures, or accelerating and optimizing their applications on a variety of data center architectures including CPUs and GPUs.

An Open Hackathon Info Session and networking event will be held Tuesday, January 20 at 3:00 pm MT. The session will be an opportunity to ask questions and connect with peers or existing teams looking for additional members for their hackathon project proposals.

If you have any questions about the event or are interested in mentoring teams at the event, please contact dhoward@ucar.edu/">Daniel Howard.