Purdue University

The Rosen Center for Advanced Computing (RCAC) is excited to announce their role as an official sponsor of the upcoming BoilerMake XII. BoilerMake is Purdue University’s premier hackathon, inviting undergraduate students from across the nation to join together for a weekend of computational and technological development. RCAC will be providing on-site assistance for the students, hosting a booth and prize, and providing GPU hours on the Anvil supercomputer to the participants. This year’s BoilerMake event will take place February 21-23, 2025.

The BoilerMake hackathon is a 36-hour event, taking place from Friday evening through Sunday morning. It is an official event of Major League Hacking, a student hackathon league that supports over 300 weekend-long competitions each year. This year, over 500 undergraduate students will participate in BoilerMake XII, where they will work in teams to learn, build, and share a cool technology-based project. The scope of this project is open-ended. Students can create anything they wish, with one caveat—it must be completely developed on-site during the hackathon. Sponsors and industry partners will be in attendance during the entirety of BoilerMake XII, hosting booths, recruiting, and giving prizes to teams who win their respective individual competitions. This gives the students the opportunity to network with numerous companies and organizations, as well as to shine in front of potential future employers. The individual competitions hosted by sponsors will be announced at the start of the hackathon on Friday. So far, over $4000 in total prizes are up for grabs.

BoilerMake XII will mark RCAC’s first year as an official sponsor of the hackathon. The main driver behind RCAC’s involvement is Geoffrey Lentner, a Lead Research Data Scientist for the organization. Lentner has volunteered as a mentor at BoilerMake for the past three years. During last year’s hackathon, it dawned on him that this would be an excellent event for RCAC to become officially involved with, and started working on plans to make it happen. Now, RCAC will host a booth, offer a prize, and provide 2000 GPU hours on the Anvil supercomputer for participants to utilize during the event. Anvil is one of Purdue University’s most powerful supercomputers, and having access to a world class high-performance computing resource will be an exciting experience for the undergraduates, who typically do not get to use such powerful systems.

“I love the creative energy of events like this,” says Lentner. “It's always a lot of fun. I'm glad we [RCAC] were able to sponsor the hackathon. Last year there were a lot of students submitting AI-related things—Anvil's GPUs should help with both fine-tuning models as well as hosting inferencing prototypes.”

Lentner will be on-site during BoilerMake XII, alongside other RCAC staff members who are excited to offer students their expertise. The crew will be available to help answer questions, solve problems, and provide inspiration for the hackathon participants.

“Participants should feel welcome to come by our table to learn more about RCAC and career opportunities in high-performance computing!”

To learn more about BoilerMake XII, please visit their website: https://boilermake.org/

Anvil is a national resource supercomputer, providing researchers from diverse backgrounds with advanced computing capabilities. Built through a $10 million system acquisition grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Anvil supports scientific discovery by providing resources through the NSF’s Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS), a program that serves tens of thousands of researchers across the United States.

Researchers may request access to Anvil via the ACCESS allocations process. More information about Anvil is available on Purdue’s Anvil website. Anyone with questions should contact anvil@purdue.edu. Anvil is funded under NSF award No. 2005632.

Written by: Jonathan Poole, poole43@purdue.edu