Assessment of the performance of beach management units (BMUs) on Lakes Victoria, Albert, Kyoga and George

Until the late 1990s the fisheries of Ugandan lakes had been managed by government where stakeholders were excluded from the decision-making process. In order to involve other stakeholders, co-management was adopted. Operationalising Co-management on landing sites has led to the formation of BMUs at gazetted landing sites. A BMU is made up of a BMU assembly and the BMU committee that it elects. A BMU committee should be: 30% boat owners; 30% boat barias 30% including fish processors, boat makers, local gear makers and repairers, fishing input dealers and managers and 10% fish mongers/traders; and if possible, 30% women. To operate at a particular landing site, one must be registered with the BMU. The BMU assembly is the supreme organ of a BMU empowered to elect, approve and remove the BMU committee

BarraCUDA – a Fast Sequence Mapping Software using Graphics Processing Units

High-throughput DNA sequencing (HTS) instruments today are capable of generating millions of sequencing reads in a short period of time, and this represents a serious challenge to current bioinformatics pipeline in processing such an enormous amount of data in a fast and economical fashion. Modern graphics cards are powerful processing units that consist of hundreds of scalar processors in parallel in order to handle the rendering of high-definition graphics in real-time. It is this computational capability that we propose to harness in order to accelerate some of the time-consuming steps in analyzing data generated by the HTS instruments. We have developed BarraCUDA, a novel sequence mapping software that utilizes the parallelism of NVIDIA CUDA graphics cards to map sequencing reads to a particular location on a reference genome. While delivering a similar mapping fidelity as other mainstream programs , BarraCUDA is a magnitude faster in mapping throughput compared to its CPU counterparts. The software is also capable of supporting multiple CUDA devices in parallel to further accelerate the mapping throughput. BarraCUDA is designed to take advantage of the parallelism of GPU to accelerate the mapping of millions of sequencing reads generated by HTS instruments. By doing this, we could, at least in part streamline the current bioinformatics pipeline such that the wider scientific community could benefit from the sequencing technology. BarraCUDA is currently available at http://seqbarracuda.sf.net

Switching characteristics of diamond-based m-i-p+ diodes in power electronic applications

Modeling and numerical analysis of diamond m-i-p+ diode have been performed for static and transient analysis using TCAD Sentaurus platform. The simulation results are compared with experimental measurements. Prediction of transient turn-off characteristics of diamond m-i-p+ diode at high temperature is performed for the first time. It was found that unlike conventional Si diode, peak reverse current in diamond m-i-p+ diode reduces with increasing temperature while on-state voltage drop increases. © 2011 IEEE.

Liquid crystal multi-mode lenses and axicons based on electronic phase shift control

We report on the principle of operation, construction and testing of a liquid crystal lens which is controlled by distributing voltages across the control electrodes, which are in turn controlled by adjusting the phase of the applied voltages. As well as (positive and negative) defocus, then lenses can be used to control tip/tilt, astigmatism, and to create variable axicons. © 2007 Optical Society of America.

BarraCUDA - a fast short read sequence aligner using graphics processing units.

BACKGROUND: With the maturation of next-generation DNA sequencing (NGS) technologies, the throughput of DNA sequencing reads has soared to over 600 gigabases from a single instrument run. General purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU), extracts the computing power from hundreds of parallel stream processors within graphics processing cores and provides a cost-effective and energy efficient alternative to traditional high-performance computing (HPC) clusters. In this article, we describe the implementation of BarraCUDA, a GPGPU sequence alignment software that is based on BWA, to accelerate the alignment of sequencing reads generated by these instruments to a reference DNA sequence. FINDINGS: Using the NVIDIA Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) software development environment, we ported the most computational-intensive alignment component of BWA to GPU to take advantage of the massive parallelism. As a result, BarraCUDA offers a magnitude of performance boost in alignment throughput when compared to a CPU core while delivering the same level of alignment fidelity. The software is also capable of supporting multiple CUDA devices in parallel to further accelerate the alignment throughput. CONCLUSIONS: BarraCUDA is designed to take advantage of the parallelism of GPU to accelerate the alignment of millions of sequencing reads generated by NGS instruments. By doing this, we could, at least in part streamline the current bioinformatics pipeline such that the wider scientific community could benefit from the sequencing technology.BarraCUDA is currently available from http://seqbarracuda.sf.net.