2026 NCAR / NOAA / NLR Open Hackathon Applications Open

The 2026 NCAR / NOAA / NLR Open Hackathon is now accepting applications. Scheduled May 5th to 7th, the Open Hackathon will be a hybrid event, with virtual introduction meetings held on April 21st and 28th, 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 4th, 2026. 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 20th at 3pm 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 Daniel Howard.