AI for Science Australian Hackathon

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. 

This multi-day hands-on event is ideal 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. Maybe you have some custom code and you want help to apply GPU optimisations? Or you are using an Alphafold workflow that requires tweaking but you need support to optimise the code? Perhaps you’ve developed an AI/ML pipeline that needs refinement? By collaborating with each other and the mentors, participants will leave with their scientific applications accelerated and/or optimised on high performance computers, or at least with a clear understanding of how to leverage these resources. 

Applications are now open and BioCommons will be represented on the review committee, so we suggest you discuss the potential of your life sciences project with benjamin@biocommons.org.au asap. To put your project forward for consideration, you must have at least 3 team members and be fluent with the code you are bringing along. Registration is free, but you will need to cover your travel expenses.

Apply now before the 6 Jan 2026 deadline