Could you benefit from some free expert advice to accelerate your research? The AI for Science Hackathon is an exciting opportunity for Australian life science projects to receive support to realise performance gains and speedups in their computation. 

In collaboration with NVIDIA and OpenACC organization, BioCommons has partnered with NCI, Monash University, Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre and SHARON.AI to support an in-person hackathon in Melbourne next February. 

Teams will be paired with experienced computational mentors based on their projects, bringing together the programming models, libraries, tools or specialised compute resources to port, accelerate and optimise their applications on whichever data centre architecture is relevant to the project. 

Who is this for:

• Scientists, researchers and developers working in Australian research institutions, NCRIS facilities, national science agencies and research centres who can bring a team to work on their computational science challenge.

• If you have custom code and are looking for help to apply GPU optimisations.

• If you use an Alphafold workflow that requires tweaking, but you need support to optimise the code.

• If you have an AI/ML pipeline that needs refinement.

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. 

• Participants are expected to attend all sessions. A minimum of 3 team members must participate throughout the entire event. Lack of complete participation will result in the entire team being removed from the event.

• 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’s much easier for the hackathon organizer to pair your team with Mentors. 

Cost:

Registration is free, but travel and accommodation costs are self-funded.

Application:

Apply now before the 6 January 2026 deadline