Engineers Only: GPU Hackathon – Fine-Tune DeepSeek + Master Chess 🇺🇸
STRONG COMPUTE GPU HACKATHON
For Engineers & AI Researchers who are comfortable with PyTorch.
Our goal is to offer the best platform to build and train models at cluster scale. Come on over, light up some clusters, have a blast and let us know what you love and what needs work.
Strong Compute’s Instant Super Computer (ISC) is designed to be the easiest way to get started on multinode training. You’ll be up and running in an hour.
Engineers only. All code. Recruiters/Slidegineers/Marketers etc. need not apply.
All applicants will be vetted for technical fit before being approved to attend.
Choose from one of the following hacks to compete in over the weekend.
Competition A: DEEPSEEK Fine Tuning
DeepSeek has landed. Come build the next demonstration of leaner meaner reasoning models dominating the big guys.
Strong Compute will provide the DeepSeek distillation model weights at your fingertips, and a bunch of GPUs to fine tune on. Over to you!
Fine-tune a DeepSeek reasoning model on your dataset and show us what it can do. The most impressive demo wins.
Details:
Challenge: Fine-tune a DeepSeek model on your dataset.
Resources: DeepSeek model variant weights downloaded ahead of time, and a demonstration of how to fine-tune on Strong Compute.
DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B
DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B
DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B
DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-14B
DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B
DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B
Compute: Dedicated GPU access via Strong Compute’s ISC
Judging: Qualitative assessment of how far you have pushed DeepSeek beyond the stock model. Ie. what can your fine tuned version do that the stock model can’t.
Competition B: Mega Chess Hackathon Overview:
Now in it’s 7th season. Our first hackathons had models a beginner could beat, our most recent hackathons hit ~2000ELO in just a weekend of training from scratch.
Train AI Chess bots on GPUs in SF.
Compete to build the best chess-playing AI with access to 48 GPU clusters and explore models, datasets, and hyperparameters.
Details:
Challenge: Train a deep neural network to evaluate chess moves based on game history and board states.
Resources: StockFish-evaluated board states, historic game PGNs, and code examples.
Compute: Dedicated GPU access via Strong Compute’s ISC
Judging: Tournament-style model face-off.
Accepted participants will get the full task, dataset, and model specifics as soon as they are accepted. Register today to get a head start!
Participant Requirements:
Experience with PyTorch and cluster training is preferred but not mandatory.
Skills in large-scale clusters (64+ GPUs) are highly valued.
Teams of 1 to 3 members are allowed. Include your team members’ names when registering. Approved participants will receive a link to our Discord competition channel.
Prize:
Prize: $2.5K-$25K open source research compute grant* for each competition.
1 prize for Deep Seek
1 prize for Chess
For Chess, if a veteran (past attendee) is the winner, the prize will be $1K-10K, with $2.5K-25K for the highest ranked novice (first time attendee).
Locations:
San Francisco, USA: Venue details will be shared upon successful application. 🇺🇸
🗓️ Event Schedule:
Sunday 16th Feb 2025 onwards:
Ad-hoc on-boarding sessions offered
Participants can get demo credits to make a head start
Friday 21 Feb 2025:
6:00 pm: Arrive. Drinks, snacks + networking
7:00 pm: Set-up, onboarding, test training run + inference
7:30 pm: Competition begins 🎉
8:30 pm: Dinner
Late: hacking
Saturday 22 Feb 2025:
9:00 am: Day two start, breakfast
1:00 pm: Lunch
4:30 pm: Final submissions 📝
6:00 pm: Dinner
6:30 pm: Competition begins
8:30pm: Wrap up.
Strong Compute
Strong Compute provides infrastructure management capability for rapid artificial intelligence development.
P.S. We're hiring and this is a great way for us to get to know each other. Open roles: https://jobs.lever.co/strongcompute
Supported by community partner:
Build Club: the home for top AI engineers in APAC
*Refer to our research grants for requirements.