This Friday (October 21), I have been to Barcelona to participate in the 1st HPC Hackathon organized by BSC. The hackathon involved three tracks involving programming tasks for different HPC domains, and there were way more tasks in total than one can solve within allocated time (10 hours non-stop). The first track was on OpenMP programming, which involved using various OpenMP constructs in an intelligent way to optimize the given code to the limit. The second track was on the application of fault tolerance and software resilience techniques on a toy application. The final one was on GPU programming using OpenACC and CUDA.
The hackathon was very challenging, and the competition for he first place lasted until the very last minute. I was very glad to be informed at the very end when I was announced as the first-place winner of the hackathon, and awarded a shiny Nvidia Titan X with Pascal architecture. I would like to thank to Leonardo Bautista Gomez, Marc Casas, Filippo Mantovani, and Antonio J. Pena for organizing this wonderful event, and NVIDIA for sponsoring this competition and the winning prize. It was such a delightful experience that I cannot wait to take part in the future HPC hackathons as participant, or even as organizer if possible.