Come spring, an epic coding contest will pit tech heads in Cambridge, Mass., against their counterparts in Cambridge, England.

“Cambridge 2 Cambridge’’ is one of several ways that the United States and the United Kingdom hope to collaborate to build more-secure information technology infrastructure. President Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron announced the hackathon in January of last year during the British premier’s US visit.

On Tuesday, at a kickoff event at MIT attended by Martin Donnelly, the UK permanent secretary for the Department of Business, Innovation and Skill, the organizers of Cambridge 2 Cambridge revealed new details about the event.

The hackathon will take place March 4 and 5. The event will begin with a 24-hour coding session at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, followed by a pitch session to judges.

The contest itself will take the form of a virtual “capture the flag’’ contest, Howard Shrobe, MIT professor and a faculty lead on the project, told BetaBoston in January.

The winning team will take home a $70,000 prize. The sponsors include Microsoft, Raytheon, Rapid7, and campus favorite Anna’s Taqueria.

CSAIL, an institution best known for research and engineering in computer science, has been dipping a toe into policy work. Besides hosting the cross-continental coding contest, the group launched a policy-focused group, the Cybersecurity and Internet Policy Initiative, last March.

Nidhi Subbaraman can be reached at nidhi.subbaraman@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @NidhiSubs.