This competition was co-organized by the Center for Artificial Intelligence Innovation at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and co-sponsored by the NCSA Industry program. The main goal of the hackathon was 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.
This competition and the awards given would not be possible without the generosity of Dr. Steve Ashby. Dr. Ashby is Director of the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, where he sets PNNL’s strategic direction and oversees its $1.5 billion R&D budget. He is a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and the American Association for the Advancement of Science; member of the Washington State Academy of Sciences; Commissioner for the U.S. Council on Competitiveness; and serves on advisory committees for local and state organizations, including the Washington Roundtable. Dr. Ashby is an alumni of the University of Illinois and earned his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science which is why he has funded this competition.
The primary focus of this year’s Hackathon was: Using LLMs as a front-end to computational workflows. The main problem focused on how to build a front-end workflow management system based on LLMs and related tools to setup and execute computational workflows. Students were provided with access to the Delta supercomputer and provided with LLM access/credits.
We started with over 50 participants that self-organized into 12 teams. Nine teams successfully completed the hackathon and presented their results that exceeded all our expectations. It was a very difficult task to decide on the winning teams. The entries were so well done we had a tie for 2nd place!
We would like to congratulate the following students for their achievement:
We would also like to thank the following people in our support team without whom this would not have been possible.
| Technical Team | Administrative Team |
| Rohan Marwaha (rohan13@illinois.edu) | Shannon Bradley (sbrad77@illinois.edu) |
| Minu Mathew (minum@illinois.edu) | Pam Joop (pjoop@illinois.edu) |
| Asmita Dabholkar (avd6@illinois.edu) | Volodymyr Kindratenko (kindrtnk@illinois.edu) |
| Kastan Day (kvday2@illinois.edu) | |
| Matthew Berry (mjberry@illinois.edu) |