Hands-on collaboration, built into the research computing pipeline
HackHPC traces back to 2018 and has since grown into a recurring network of hackathons, codeathons, training institutes, and faculty development programs — run with partners across national laboratories, research computing centers, and industry.
Mission
Give students, faculty, and researchers hands-on experience with high-performance computing, AI, and science gateways through short, intensive, mentored events — lowering the barrier to entry into research computing careers.
How it works
Each event pairs participants with mentors from partner institutions to tackle a real research-computing challenge over a few days to a few weeks, culminating in team presentations, posters, or working prototypes.
Who's involved
Events are organized in partnership with organizations like ADMI, TACC, ORNL, and the Science Gateways community (SGX3/SGCI) — see the full list on the Partners page.
Who shows up, and where
Aggregated from HackHPC's participant records since 2018 — counted per person, not per sign-up, so someone who's come back for five events is counted once here. No names or contact information are included in these figures.
Counts are participation records (a person joining two events in the same year counts twice here) — hover a segment for its exact count.
Majors are self-reported by student participants; mentors, organizers, and staff records generally don't include one, so this reflects the 357 people who reported a field of study, not everyone in the dataset.
From one hackathon to a recurring program
HackHPC began in 2018 as a pair of hackathons — HackHPC@PEARC18 that July in Pittsburgh, and Cloud HPC Hack @ SC18 that November in Dallas — built on a simple premise: put students on a team, pair them with a mentor from a national lab or research computing center, and give them a few intense days to build something real with high-performance computing. The format held up, and it multiplied. What started as one-off hackathons at partner conferences grew into a recurring, multi-track program: annual hackathons at the ADMI Symposium on Computing at Minority Institutions since 2022, a faculty-focused counterpart (FacultyHack@Gateways) built with the Science Gateways Community Institute, an "HPC in the City" hackathon series that ran alongside the Supercomputing (SC) conference for several years, and codeathons and training institutes run with the SGX3 Center of Excellence.
The program has long been organized by Je'aime Powell, Linda Bailey Hayden, Amy Cannon, Boyd Wilson, Alexander Nolte, and Charlie Dey, and its approach has been documented in its own right — the "HackHPC Model" was formalized in a peer-reviewed paper at Gateways 2022, with follow-on research on FacultyHack's format and on hackathon research more broadly published through 2024 (see Research). Today that's 32 events and counting, run in partnership with national laboratories, research computing centers, and industry, with most leaving behind a public GitHub repository of what the teams actually built — browsable event by event on the timeline below.
Every event, grouped by the conference or program that hosted it — hover a dot for details, click to open its site.