Facebook’s annual Hacker Cup starts… NOW!

Facebook is getting its hack on.

The social media giant’s hugely popular annual Hacker Cup competition kicks off today at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters at 2:00 pm Pacific Time today.

Twenty five participants from the U.S., Japan, Poland, Russia, Australia, Taiwan, Ukraine, China, Belarus, and Switzerland will take part.

At 5:00 pm, the winners will be feted at an awards ceremony at Hacker Square. Top prize is $10,000, and smaller cash awards will be doled for those coming in second and third.

The Hacker Cup has developed into a serious annual Facebook event. This is the third year running, although internal Facebook hackathons happen frequently.The event is the brainchild of Facebook software engineer David Alves.

“It’s a series of coding challenges the participants have to go through,” a Facebook spokesperson told Venture Beat. “It’s going to be fun.”

Russian Petr Mitrichev, 29, took the top spot last year. He also won the cup in 2011. Mitrichev is also competing in today’s competition.

From the Facebook hackathon page:

“Hackathons are a big tradition at Facebook. They serve as the foundation for some great (and not so great) ideas. It gives our employees the opportunity to try out new ideas and collaborate with other people in a fun environment.”

Facebook’s engineering director Andrew Bosworth talks about the event in a video here:

See you there!