February 24, 2026 - by CSCS
Eurohack26 is a hackathon devoted to porting scientific applications to GPUs of different vendors or other massive parallel architectures, as well as optimizing existing high-performance computing applications. AI applications are welcome if they require massive compute power to be provided by parallel archidectures.
The event will take place in person, from September 7 to 11, 2026, at Hotel de la Paix in Lugano, located in the Italian speaking area of Switzerland.
Background
High Performance Computing utilizes more and more parallelism provided by modern supercomputers. One development is General-Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs), which offers exceptionally high memory bandwidth and performance for a wide range of applications together with many parallel programming units. Another development is more parallelism also for multicore processors. Today, these devices can be programmed with the CUDA/C++ programming platform, HIP or with OpenACC directives for accelerators, which offer straightforward extensions to C++ and Fortran to address this programming hurdle. Alternative programming paradigms such as OpenCL or Kokkos can also be employed.
The workshop does not solely focus on the programming techniques but also on the algorithmic aspects of the codes. These algorithms could be numerical ones such as parallel methods for linear algebra as part of parallel solutions of partial differential equations, but also non-numerical aspects for optimal performance like sorting of data and the optimal choice of communication patterns. Adaptations and redesign of codes will be discussed to accommodate massive parallelism.
Workshop Goal
EuroHack provides a unique opportunity for current or prospective users groups of large hybrid CPU-GPU systems to either (1) port their (potentially) scalable application to GPU accelerators, (2) optimize an existing GPU-enabled application, on a state-of-the-art GPU system, or (3) optimize for the multicore. Focus should be in any case the parallelism of the application. In case of AI applications a special emphasis will be the extension from single-GPU to multi-GPU / multi-node setups. The goal is that the development teams leave at the end of the week with applications executing faster, or at least with a clear roadmap of how to get there. The workshop will contain discussion, hands-on, and scrum sessions.
Target Audience and Format
This program is addressed to small teams of 3 to maximum 4 developers interested in porting or optimizing their application on a cluster of CPUs and GPU accelerators in a short but extremely intense time window. This is a great opportunity for grad students and Postdocs.
Collectively the team should know the application intimately. There will be intensive mentoring during this 5-day hands-on workshop. Mentors come from universities, supercomputing centers and industry, and they bring their extensive experience in programming GPGPUs, many of them develop the GPU-capable compilers and help define the OpenACC standard.
The in person part of the event will be limited to 5 or 6 teams of 3 to 4 developers with 2 mentors for each team.
Submissions
We are pleased to announce that submissions for EuroHack26 are now open. We invite teams to propose an application to be ported to or be optimized on GPU or other massive parallel architectures. The CSCS "Alps" Grace-Hopper machine will be utilized for the workshop. The selected teams will be joined by two mentors with extensive programming experience.
The submission deadline is April 30, 2026, anywhere on Earth.
Full details including the link for submissions can be found in the event page >