18–19 October 2026 · The Neuro · Montréal

Hack the brain at
ultra-high resolution.

Two days of building, testing, and breaking tools for BigBrain and other high-resolution brain datasets — with the people who make them. On-site, 76 seats, immediately before the 10th BigBrain Workshop.

Register — 76 seats Pitch a project
Dates
Sun 18 – Mon 19 Oct 2026
09:00 – 18:00 both days
Venue
de Grandpré Communications Centre
Montreal Neurological Institute
Cost
Free to attend
Advance registration required
BigBrain coronal section, 20 µm isotropic resolution

Compute partners

Dell and NVIDIA are putting a petaflop on every table.

Twenty Dell Pro Max workstations with NVIDIA GB10 will be on site for teams to develop on for the full two days.*

  • Superchip NVIDIA GB10 Grace Blackwell
  • Memory 128 GB unified LPDDR5X
  • Storage 2 TB NVMe SSD
  • OS NVIDIA DGX OS 7
  • Link ConnectX-7, pair two units over 200G
Full specifications at Dell. →
*Subject to change depending on sponsor availability.

What it is

The BigBrain Hackathon brings together researchers, trainees, developers, and data scientists from the BigBrain and broader neuroimaging communities. It's a focused space to build, test, and refine tools for working with BigBrain and related high-resolution brain datasets.

Participants collaborate on practical neuroimaging problems in data analysis, visualization, multimodal integration, and computational methods, while sharing expertise across disciplines. The aim is to start new collaborations, accelerate open tool development, and support community-driven innovation .

You don't need to arrive with a project. Pitches happen on the morning of Day 1, teams form on the spot, and every project is open to newcomers.

Part of BigBrain Week

The hackathon runs immediately before the 10th BigBrain Workshop (21–22 October) and its Training Day (20 October), both in Montréal. Come for one, stay for all three.

BigBrain Workshop 2026 →

Projects

Pitch a project.

Projects are submitted as GitHub issues and appear on this page automatically. Anyone can propose one: a tool to build, a dataset to wrangle, a method to test, a stubborn bug to finally kill. Keep the scope to two days and say what help you need.

Submit a project Browse on GitHub

Loading projects…

Schedule · provisional

Two days, 09:00 to 18:00.

Day 1

Sunday 18 October

  1. 09:00Doors, coffee, badge pickup
  2. 09:30WelcomeBigBrain, HIBALL, and how the two days work
  3. 10:00Project pitchesTwo minutes each, from the submitted list
  4. 10:45Team formationPick a room, pick a table, start
  5. 11:00Hacking
  6. 12:30Lunch
  7. 13:30HackingGB10 onboarding clinic runs alongside, with Dell and NVIDIA
  8. 15:30Coffee
  9. 16:00Hacking
  10. 17:30Day 1 standupOne minute per team: what moved, what's stuck
  11. 18:00Venue closes

Day 2

Monday 19 October

  1. 09:00Doors, coffee
  2. 09:15StandupPlan for the day, late joiners find a team
  3. 09:30Hacking
  4. 12:30Lunch
  5. 13:30Hacking
  6. 15:30Coffee and demo prep
  7. 16:00Project demosFive minutes per team, live, failures welcome
  8. 17:15Participant vote
  9. 17:40GB10 award and closeThe winning team takes a workstation home
  10. 18:00Venue closes

Provisional. Rooms and timings will be confirmed closer to the event.

Getting there

The Neuro, on the mountain.

de Grandpré Communications Centre

Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital
3801 University Street
Montréal, Québec H3A 2B4
Canada

Open in Maps →
Metro
McGill (green line) or Peel (green line), then a 10–15 minute walk uphill. The last stretch is steep.
Accessibility
The room is wheelchair accessible. Tell us what you need when you register and we'll sort it out.
Food
Breakfast, coffee, and lunch are provided both days. Dietary requirements are collected at registration.
Bring
A laptop. GB10 workstations are shared between teams; power and wifi are provided.

Registration

76 seats available

Attendance is free, but the room is capped at 80 and we expect to fill it. Register in advance — there are no walk-in places on the day.

If registration below doesn't work, click here for link to registration website