Mississippi State University

About: Mississippi State University is a education organization based out in Starkville, Mississippi, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Catfish. The organization has 14115 authors who have published 28594 publications receiving 700030 citations. The organization is also known as: The Mississippi State University of Agriculture and Applied Science & Mississippi State University of Agriculture and Applied Science.

Software Development Environments for Scientific and Engineering Software: A Series of Case Studies

Abstract: The need for high performance computing applications for computational science and engineering projects is growing rapidly, yet there have been few detailed studies of the software engineering process used for these applications. The DARPA High Productivity Computing Systems Program has sponsored a series of case studies of representative computational science and engineering projects to identify the steps involved in developing such applications (i.e. the life cycle, the workflows, technical challenges, and organizational challenges). Secondary goals were to characterize tool usage and identify enhancements that would increase the programmers' productivity. Finally, these studies were designed to develop a set of lessons learned that can be transferred to the general computational science and engineering community to improve the software engineering process used for their applications. Nine lessons learned from five representative projects are presented, along with their software engineering implications, to provide insight into the software development environments in this domain.

The Gene Ontology's Reference Genome Project: A Unified Framework for Functional Annotation across Species

Abstract: The Gene Ontology (GO) is a collaborative effort that provides structured vocabularies for annotating the molecular function, biological role, and cellular location of gene products in a highly systematic way and in a species-neutral manner with the aim of unifying the representation of gene function across different organisms. Each contributing member of the GO Consortium independently associates GO terms to gene products from the organism(s) they are annotating. Here we introduce the Reference Genome project, which brings together those independent efforts into a unified framework based on the evolutionary relationships between genes in these different organisms. The Reference Genome project has two primary goals: to increase the depth and breadth of annotations for genes in each of the organisms in the project, and to create data sets and tools that enable other genome annotation efforts to infer GO annotations for homologous genes in their organisms. In addition, the project has several important incidental benefits, such as increasing annotation consistency across genome databases, and providing important improvements to the GO's logical structure and biological content.

The economics of harvesting and transporting corn stover for conversion to fuel ethanol: a case study for Minnesota.

Abstract: Corn stover harvest and transport cost functions were estimated for two harvest operations for a proposed biomass-to-ethanol conversion facility located in southern Minnesota, USA. This work presents an alternative methodology to estimating corn stover quantities and harvest costs at the county level, taking into account county-specific yields, transportation distances, erosion constraints, machinery specifications, and other key variables. Monte Carlo simulation was also used to estimate the probability distribution of costs under alternative assumption on key parameters whose values vary widely in the literature. Marginal stover cost for 50MM gal/year of ethanol output was estimated at $54/dt ($0.77/gal ethanol) for the more intensive harvest method and $65/dt ($0.80/gal) for the less intensive method. Costs were greater than $62/dt ($0.89/gal) for a facility producing > 200MM gal/year under the more intensive harvest method, and greater than $84/dt ($1.21/gal) for the less-intensive harvest method. Monte Carlo simulation estimated a mean marginal cost of $52/dt ($63/dt under the less intensive harvest method) for 50MM gal ethanol output, with an $11 ($9) standard deviation. Costs were found to be at or below $62/dt 90 percent of the time ($71/dt for the less-intensive method). An $11/dt standard deviation in stover cost would result in a $0.16/gal swing in ethanol cost. Overall, costs were found to be consistently higher than those found in the literature, but even under a variety of parameter assumptions, costs tended to stay within a $10/dt range of the mean.

Robustness to Non-Normality of the Multivariate EWMA Control Chart

Abstract: The effects of non-normality on the statistical performance of the multivariate exponentially moving average (MEWMA) control chart, and the Hotelling chi-squared chart in particular, is investigated when used in individual observations to monitor the me..