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2024 ASHBY PRIZE IN COMPUTATIONAL SCIENCE Hackathon

This competition is co-organized by the Center for Artificial Intelligence Innovation at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. The main goal of the hackathon is to let talented UIUC students showcase their skills in a friendly competition while working on challenging problems involving computational science and machine learning using state-of-the-art computational systems at NCSA.

The competition will take place on April 20-21 at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications with the final presentation of the competition results on April 23 during the NCSA Student Research Conference. We encourage you to sign up soon using this Registration Link. Deadline for registration is April 12, 2024.

Eligibility: Teams must have two or more students (undergraduate and/or graduate) with at least one currently enrolled in the Computer Science Department. Students are encouraged to form teams of up to five students.

Criteria: Teams will be evaluated on the following:

  1. Innovative approach with respect to utilizing LLMs to generate and execute a workflow, as well as the use of machine learning, information visualization, and other computational techniques.
  2. Effective use of NCSA computing resources, including performance on its flagship AI platform.
  3. Quality of a written project summary and oral presentation.
  4. Relevance of the developed solution.

Prize: 1st place $3000, 2nd place $1500, 3rd place $750

HACKATHON PROJECT

Using LLMs as a front-end to computational workflows

Science team contact: Daniel Katz (dskatz@illinois.edu), Matthew Berry (mjberry@illinois.edu)
Technical team contact: Kastan Day (kvday2@illinois.edu), Minu Matthew (minum@illinois.edu), Rohan Marwaha (rohan13@illinois.edu), Asmita Dabholkar (avd6@illinois.edu)

Problem: The main problem to be addressed in this hackathon is how to build a front-end workflow management system based on an LLM and related tools to setup and execute computational workflows. An initial attempt at solving this problem is described in arXiv:2312.07711. Relevant code and data are available on GitHub. Students will be provided with access to Delta supercomputer and OpenAI API credits.

SCHEDULE

Thursday, March 28
Application form is open to register competition teams (on-line)

Friday, April 12
Deadline for registration

Monday, April 15
8:00am — Teams are announced (on-line)
4:00pm — Overview of the Hackathon rules, challenge problem, and a brief intro to Delta computing environment (1104 NCSA)

Saturday, April 20
8:30am — Teams work on the problem (light breakfast will be provided) (1104 NCSA)
Noon — Lunch (pizza will be provided) (1104 NCSA)
1:00pm — Teams continue to work on the challenge problems (snacks will be provided) (1104 NCSA)
4:00pm — Teams briefing (1104 NCSA)

Sunday, April 21
8:30am — Teams work on the problem (light breakfast will be provided) (1104 NCSA)
Noon — Lunch (pizza will be provided) (1104 NCSA)
1:00pm — Teams continue to work on the challenge problems (snacks will be provided) (1104 NCSA)
4:00pm — Teams briefing (1104 NCSA)

Tuesday, April 23
4:00pm — Teams present results (TBD)

Wednesday, April 24
Winning teams are announced