KISTI Concludes the 2026 KISTI Open Hackathon

- Co-hosted with HPE, NVIDIA, and the OpenACC Organization

- Research Conducted Using the Pilot System of KISTI’s 6th National Supercomputer, “HANGANG”

- With the Introduction of “HANGANG,” the Event Enabled Pilot-System-Based Research and Expanded Researcher Exchange

□ The Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI, President Sik Lee) successfully held the 2026 KISTI Open Hackathon, jointly organized with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), NVIDIA, and the OpenACC Organization. The event began with an online orientation and team–mentor meetings on 25 March, followed by the main hackathon held from 31 March to 3 April at KIUM Hall of KISTI.

    * A hackathon is a compound term combining “hacking” and “marathon,” referring to a team-based event in which participants work intensively over a set period to develop prototype-level outcomes.

□ Now in its third year, the hackathon drew applications from 25 teams. Of these, eight teams comprising 29 participants were selected, including four teams in high-performance computing (HPC) and four teams in artificial intelligence (AI). The selected participants conducted research on code optimization and performance acceleration in the AI and HPC fields using the pilot system of KISTI’s 6th national supercomputer, “HANGANG” (hereafter “Supercomputer No. 6”), equipped with four GH200s per node across a total of 22 nodes.

   * The pilot system is a testbed environment built ahead of the deployment of the main supercomputing system so that researchers can verify performance and optimize their codes in a real research environment.

□ The hackathon focused on research projects across a wide range of fields, including artificial intelligence, materials engineering, bioscience, molecular dynamics, and computational fluid dynamics. A total of 17 domestic and international experts from KISTI, NVIDIA, and HPE, participating in the KISTI–HPE–NVIDIA Center of Excellence (CoE), served as mentors throughout the event. Participants used parallel computing and machine-learning frameworks such as OpenACC, PyTorch, and CUDA to address research challenges through code optimization and performance improvement.

    * The Center of Excellence (CoE) is an AI·HPC expert collaboration framework jointly operated by KISTI, HPE, and NVIDIA to strengthen capabilities in GPU-accelerated computing and scientific AI research based on the sixth national supercomputer “HANGANG.”

    ○ Each participating team achieved performance acceleration of up to 41.8 times by using the GH200-based pilot system of Supercomputer No. 6, compared with the previous-generation A100 GPU architecture. Some teams also succeeded in expanding computational scale by more than twofold by leveraging the advantages of the new GPU architecture’s memory capacity and bandwidth.

    ○ Through close collaboration with mentors specializing in each field, participants applied code profiling, parallelization, and optimization techniques, enabling them to achieve results that significantly exceeded their original goals.

□ In addition, participants and mentors shared their experiences in code optimization and performance improvement through daily scrum sessions held throughout the event. These sessions allowed each team to identify issues and areas for improvement in real time and make immediate adjustments. Based on the outcomes of the daily scrums, mentor meetings were held each evening to provide feedback tailored to each team, helping enhance engagement throughout the hackathon. Communication was also highly active through the online collaboration platform, where numerous posts were shared, further strengthening exchange and collaboration among participants.

□ Jihoon Kang, Director of the Supercomputing Application Research Center at KISTI, stated “this hackathon was especially meaningful in that it enabled researchers to proactively apply GPU-based parallel computing technologies and strengthen their practical capabilities by using the pre-established pilot system ahead of the launch of the next-generation supercomputer ‘HANGANG.’ In particular, we plan to further expand CoE collaboration and continue supporting both the creation of research outcomes and broader collaboration among researchers through hackathons.”

Welcome Remarks by KISTI President Sik Lee at KISTI Open Hackathon

KISTI Open Hackathon

KISTI Open Hackathon

KISTI Open Hackathon

Group Photo at KISTI Open Hackathon