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), including loops that use gem5 and many other architecture research tools. 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 the A^3 workshop co-organizers at a3-workshop-hackathon@eecs.berkeley.edu. Cheers, Sagar -- Sagar Karandikar Assistant Professor EECS, UC Berkeley https://sagark.org

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-workshop-hackathon@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 On Thu, Aug 20, 2026 at 2:59 PM Sagar Karandikar <sagark@eecs.berkeley.edu> wrote: > 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), including loops that use gem5 and many other > architecture research tools. > > 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 the A^3 workshop co-organizers at > a3-workshop-hackathon@eecs.berkeley.edu. > > Cheers, > Sagar > > -- > Sagar Karandikar > Assistant Professor > EECS, UC Berkeley > https://sagark.org >