Call for Participation

A thunderous noise coming from the street wakes you up. It sounded like a huge explosion coming from the underground. The windows are still shaking. You look at the clock, it is only 7:11 in the morning. You still feel tired after a long night of coding. The characters in the terminal on your screen are still dancing like insects around the light; your program is still computing. You start hearing people shouting in the streets, so you jump to your computer and start searching information about it. It takes you just a couple of minutes to find out what is going on: the city has just suffered one of the biggest natural disasters in recorded history. Social networks are flooding with comments about it in all directions. What you find is even more disturbing: the worst is yet to come. Experts are talking about a second hit but it is not clear where or when is gonna happen. Panic starts spreading over the city like a dark fog. You serve yourself a glass of water while your phone rings and you hear the voice on the other side saying: “Hey, we need your help!”.

Are you addicted to coding and solving complex problems? Come to the 1st Annual BSC/UPC HPC Hackathon and help us save the city! The fate of thousands of sims depends on you. In this competition you will be asked to think elegant and efficient solutions for challenging problems. Time will be your most important enemy, as you struggle to solve as many problems as possible in a limited time: nature does not wait.


To participate, you will need good coding skills, primarily in C and shell, but knowledge in other programming languages such as C++ and python is recommended. You should also be familiar with version control systems, such as git and mercurial, and have a good knowledge on Unix systems. You will be asked to solve problems in three different topics: GPU Computing, Parallel Programming and Software Security. You will be given access to high-end machines with last generation technology and high speed network. We will also provide you with food and beverages so that you can focus on coding.

The hackathon will take place on Friday October 21st, at the UPC Campus Nord - Agora Room, from 8h to 20h. A jury will evaluate the participants and the winners will take home nice prizes. Among the prizes, there is a last generation high-end gaming GPU offered by nVidia!

Awards:

The top participant of the Hackathon will get:
  • NVIDIA Titan-X GPU
  • 1-year part-time contract to work at BSC (or a full-time internship). This award will be assigned to the second participant if the first refuses it.