CHIA hackathon with free cloud/LLM credit and cash prizes!

[Sagar Karandikar]

Hi CHIA community!

Want to dive in to building and harnessing agentic flows for computer architecture, systems, and chip design research for free and win prizes?

Google is sponsoring a CHIA hackathon in the lead up to the A^3: Agentic Approaches to Architecture Workshop at the 2026 International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO) in Athens, Greece. Google will provide free cloud and AI model access to hackathon participants solving cool architecture/systems/VLSI problems by building agentic loops in CHIA (https://chialoops.ai).

Hackathon winners will receive cash prizes and give talks on their work at the A^3 Workshop! All hackathon participants will be invited to present a poster on their creative agentic loops at the workshop as well.

To register for the hackathon, we require a very short (1 page max) proposal outlining some details about your planned hackathon project. The hackathon page outlines several potential project ideas, or you can propose your own! Registrations/proposals are due August 25 (but are very simple!). Learn more and find out how to register and submit your proposal here: https://agentic-arch.org/hackathon.html

If you have questions, reach out to me and the other A^3 workshop co-organizers at a3-worksho...@eecs.berkeley.edu.

Thanks,

Sagar

--

Sagar Karandikar

Assistant Professor

EECS, UC Berkeley

https://sagark.org

[Sagar Karandikar]

Two quick updates on the CHIA hackathon:

The winning team will now also receive an NVIDIA RTX 5080 GPU*, thanks to sponsorship from NVIDIA, in addition to the cash prizes sponsored by Google. The full prize breakdown is now:

- 1st place: $750 + an NVIDIA RTX 5080 GPU*
- 2nd place: $500
- 3rd place: $250

All three winning teams will also give talks at the A^3 Workshop at MICRO 2026 in Athens, and every hackathon participant is invited to present a poster on their agentic loops.

Second, a reminder that registrations are due tomorrow, August 25. The proposal for registration is just one page describing your planned project, and the hackathon page lists several project ideas if you'd like a starting point (or propose your own). Participants get free Google Compute Platform, Gemini, and other Google AI platform credits to build with.

Register and submit here: https://agentic-arch.org/hackathon.html

Questions? Reach out to me and the other A^3 workshop co-organizers at a3-worksho...@eecs.berkeley.edu.

*GPU can be shipped to a U.S. address only.

Thanks,

Sagar

--

Sagar Karandikar

Assistant Professor

EECS, UC Berkeley

https://sagark.org