Santos Dumont Supercomputer to Support AI Hackathon for Public Health

The Artificial Intelligence Institute of the National Laboratory for Scientific Computing (IIA-LNCC) is one of the supporters of the Artificial Intelligence Hackathon (HKIA2025), taking place from October 10 to 12. Through the Institute’s coordination, the event will feature the use of the Santos Dumont supercomputer—the most powerful in Latin America, available to the scientific community—to provide high-performance computing capacity to participants in the development of innovative solutions for Brazil’s Unified Health System (SUS).

The initiative, promoted by the Coppe/UFRJ Business Incubator and Cietec (USP Incubator), aims to mobilize technology and innovation to address some of the main challenges of Brazil’s public healthcare system. One specific focus will be the exploration of the Rio de Janeiro health Data Lake, in collaboration with the Municipal Health Department, which is developing a new regulation system. The solutions may leverage this vast dataset to improve demand forecasting, smart resource allocation, and service prioritization, using advanced NVIDIA frameworks available in the Santos Dumont infrastructure.

“Making the computational power of Santos Dumont available for this initiative through the IIA-LNCC reinforces our commitment to fostering innovation in public health. It is the Institute’s mission to connect high-level artificial intelligence to the most pressing social demands, and HKIA2025 embodies exactly that goal,” highlighted Bruno Menezes, researcher at IIA-LNCC and liaison with the event’s organization.

From an operational standpoint, the partnership carries significance beyond processing capacity. As explained by Marcos Chaves Martins, Head of the Coppe/UFRJ Business Incubator: “The importance of the Santos Dumont infrastructure being available is that participants will have full creative freedom and autonomy during the Hackathon. [...] There is a clear vocation for talent development here. [...] In essence, this is about fostering talent and professional training.”

Thus, the supercomputer will serve a dual purpose: as the foundation for developing complex AI models requiring high performance, and simultaneously as a training ground where a new generation will gain hands-on experience with high-performance computing (HPC), a crucial and rare skillset in the market.

The solutions developed during the hackathon will be released as open-source code, under a Linux license, allowing public and private institutions across the country to benefit from and build upon the results, strengthening Brazil’s innovation ecosystem in healthcare.

The initiative, sponsored by Visagio, Fiocruz, FAPERJ, and Reditus, will award the five best proposals with R$ 4,000 each and US$ 10,000 in AWS (Amazon Web Services) credits. Before the competition, participants will have access to exclusive content such as study tracks, practical guides, and webinars, developed in partnership with leading institutions including NVIDIA, AWS, and LNCC itself.

Learn more at: https://www.hackathon-ia.coppe.ufrj.br/

IIA-LNCC Communication Office
instituto.ia@lncc.br