CHIA Hackathon

Jump in to agentic architecture fast!

We are excited to announce an agentic-architecture hackathon leading up to the MICRO A³ Workshop. Participants will be awarded free credit for Google Compute Platform, Gemini, and other Google AI platforms to build out their agentic architecture ideas in the CHIA framework. The top three final projects will receive cash prizes ($750, $500, $250) and be invited to give a talk on their work at the A³ workshop at MICRO in Athens, Greece. All participants will be invited to present a poster at the workshop.

Submit a proposal → How it works

Invent and share creative agentic architecture loops!

Google is sponsoring a CHIA hackathon at the 2026 MICRO A³ workshop. Participants will use CHIA to build and share the most novel, creative agentic loop(s) to address challenges across HW/SW co-design. Hackathon participants will be provided with free access to the compute platforms needed to run their agentic flows, such as GCP, Gemini, and other Google AI platforms.

Participants will make those loops accessible to the community as composable building blocks integrated into the open-source CHIA framework, with access to direct support from the CHIA developers. Importantly, participants need not start from scratch: there are plenty of CHIA loop examples in the CHIA paper and CHIA open-source documentation (example loop docs: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) and CHIA makes it easy to reliably design and run large, distributed agentic architecture loops on Google's AI platforms.

What is CHIA?

CHIA is an open framework for rapidly designing and deploying custom AI-driven HW/SW co-design flows at scale, developed by the SLICE lab at UC Berkeley, the same group behind widely-used research platforms such as RISC-V, Chipyard, FireSim, BOOM, and Hammer.

CHIA includes built-in support for many kinds of architecture tools, including Chipyard, ESP, gem5, ChampSim, FireSim, Hammer, Verilator, Spike, CIRCT, and many more. Adding a new tool and demonstrating agentic capabilities within it is also welcome in the hackathon! CHIA also ships with built-in support for Google's Gemini, Antigravity, GCP, AlphaEvolve, and many other AI platforms.

More information is available at chialoops.ai and in the arXiv paper. The CHIA developers will be on-hand throughout the hackathon to help participants with questions.

How the hackathon works

Participation starts with submitting a (short) proposal. Every team that submits a proposal gets compute credits and can compete — the review decides how much compute you get, not whether you participate.

Have questions? Reach the organizers at a3-workshop-hackathon@eecs.berkeley.edu.

Aug 25 Proposals due

Submit a one-page (max) proposal

Tell us what you plan to build: an overview of the task you are addressing (from the problem tracks, or your own), your methodology (loop design), the expected results, and a cost estimate for the cloud compute and API credits you will need (target $100–$1,500). See how to submit a proposal for the full requirements.

Aug 29 Selections announced

Get compute funding — quickly

The A³ program committee reviews every proposal and selects the projects that receive long-term compute funding: credits covering the full budget in the proposal, for the whole month-long hackathon.

Proposals that are not selected still receive short-term compute funding — enough credits to run for 3–4 days with costs covered — so every team can build and compete. Decisions are turned around fast: just four days from the proposal deadline to the announcement.

After the Aug 25 deadline, proposals for short-term compute funding continue to be accepted until Sep 13, so you can still join the hackathon late.

Aug 29 – Sep 20 Hackathon

Build your agentic loop

From the kick-off, teams use CHIA and their Google credits to execute on the proposal, with direct support from the CHIA developers.

Sep 20 Final submission

Submit your completed project

All participants — long-term and short-term alike — submit to the same deadline at the end of the hackathon: a 4-page paper plus your open-sourced loop and its results. See end-of-hackathon project submission.

Sep 24 Winners announced

Win prizes and invitations to present at the workshop!

Submissions are judged by the A³ workshop's program committee. The top three take home cash prizes and are invited to give talks at the A³ Workshop. All participants are invited to present a poster at the workshop.

Nov 1 Workshop day

Present at MICRO

The A³ Workshop will be co-located with MICRO 2026 in Greece on November 1 and will include talks from the hackathon winners and posters from all hackathon participants!

See proposal requirements → Problem tracks

How to submit a proposal

What to include

A one-page (max) proposal

An overview of the task addressed. Choose from the problem tracks above, or propose your own.
A methodology covering your loop design and execution plan.
The expected results.
A cost estimate of the cloud compute and API credits you will need. Proposals should target a running cost between $100 and $1,500.

Submit one proposal per project. Proposals will be evaluated by the A³ workshop's program committee.

Submit a proposal →

Have questions? Reach the organizers at a3-workshop-hackathon@eecs.berkeley.edu.

End-of-hackathon project submission

Detailed instructions will follow once the hackathon starts. The rough expectation is below, so you can plan for it from day one.

End-of-hackathon Write-up

A 4-page paper

A short paper describing your loop and what you found. This paper does not preclude future conference or workshop publication.

Artifact

Your loop, open-sourced

Release the CHIA loop you built, with the results it produced. Strong loops may be upstreamed into mainline CHIA, so the community can build on them as composable blocks.

Resources, prizes & recognition

The hackathon is sponsored by Google.

Compute & credits

Google is providing Gemini and Google Cloud (GCP) credits for the hackathon, giving teams the API access and cloud compute they need for their CHIA loops.

Cash prizes

Google is providing cash prizes for the top three submissions.

1st place: $750
2nd place: $500
3rd place: $250

Present at MICRO 2026 in Greece

Participants are invited to MICRO 2026 in Greece, where they will either give a talk or present a poster at the A³ Workshop (Sunday Nov 1).

Winners are announced Sep 24, four days before the MICRO early-registration deadline on Sep 28.