Al Piskun at 18:18, 3 July 2026

2026-07-03T18:18:54Z

← Older revision		Revision as of 18:18, 3 July 2026
Line 73:		Line 73:
	== Scientific publications ==		== Scientific publications ==

	===== ~~Project related~~ =====		=== Publications using BOINC-computed data ===
			# Wang, Chao, Haicang Zhang, Wei-Mou Zheng, Dong Xu, Jianwei Zhu, Bing Wang, Kang Ning, Shiwei Sun, Shuai Cheng Li and Dongbo Bu. [https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btv581 FALCON@home: a high-throughput protein structure prediction server based on remote homologue recognition]. ''Bioinformatics'' 32, no. 3 (2016): 462 to 464.

			=== Other project-related publications ===
	# Zhu, Jianwei, Haicang Zhang, Chao Wang, Bin Ling, Wei-Mou Zheng and Dongbo Bu. [https://arxiv.org/abs/1507.03197 TOPO: Improving remote homologue recognition via identifying common protein structure framework]. arXiv preprint arXiv:1507.03197 (2015).		# Zhu, Jianwei, Haicang Zhang, Chao Wang, Bin Ling, Wei-Mou Zheng and Dongbo Bu. [https://arxiv.org/abs/1507.03197 TOPO: Improving remote homologue recognition via identifying common protein structure framework]. arXiv preprint arXiv:1507.03197 (2015).

	~~===== BOINC calculation results =====~~
	# Wang, Chao, Haicang Zhang, Wei-Mou Zheng, Dong Xu, Jianwei Zhu, Bing Wang, Kang Ning, Shiwei Sun, Shuai Cheng Li and Dongbo Bu. [https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btv581 FALCON@home: a high-throughput protein structure prediction server based on remote homologue recognition]. ''Bioinformatics'' 32, no. 3 (2016): 462 to 464.
	== References ==		== References ==
	{{Reflist}}		{{Reflist}}

Al Piskun: /* Scientific publications */ clarify

2026-07-02T20:23:56Z

Scientific publications: clarify

← Older revision		Revision as of 20:23, 2 July 2026
Line 73:		Line 73:
	== Scientific publications ==		== Scientific publications ==

	# Wang, Chao, Haicang Zhang, Wei-Mou Zheng, Dong Xu, Jianwei Zhu, Bing Wang, Kang Ning, Shiwei Sun, Shuai Cheng Li and Dongbo Bu. [https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btv581 FALCON@home: a high-throughput protein structure prediction server based on remote homologue recognition]. ''Bioinformatics'' 32, no. 3 (2016): 462 to 464.		===== Project related =====
	# Zhu, Jianwei, Haicang Zhang, Chao Wang, Bin Ling, Wei-Mou Zheng and Dongbo Bu. [https://arxiv.org/abs/1507.03197 TOPO: Improving remote homologue recognition via identifying common protein structure framework]. arXiv preprint arXiv:1507.03197 (2015).		# Zhu, Jianwei, Haicang Zhang, Chao Wang, Bin Ling, Wei-Mou Zheng and Dongbo Bu. [https://arxiv.org/abs/1507.03197 TOPO: Improving remote homologue recognition via identifying common protein structure framework]. arXiv preprint arXiv:1507.03197 (2015).

			===== BOINC calculation results =====
			# Wang, Chao, Haicang Zhang, Wei-Mou Zheng, Dong Xu, Jianwei Zhu, Bing Wang, Kang Ning, Shiwei Sun, Shuai Cheng Li and Dongbo Bu. [https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btv581 FALCON@home: a high-throughput protein structure prediction server based on remote homologue recognition]. ''Bioinformatics'' 32, no. 3 (2016): 462 to 464.
	== References ==		== References ==
	{{Reflist}}		{{Reflist}}

Al Piskun at 23:26, 29 June 2026

2026-06-29T23:26:48Z

← Older revision		Revision as of 23:26, 29 June 2026
Line 76:		Line 76:
	# Zhu, Jianwei, Haicang Zhang, Chao Wang, Bin Ling, Wei-Mou Zheng and Dongbo Bu. [https://arxiv.org/abs/1507.03197 TOPO: Improving remote homologue recognition via identifying common protein structure framework]. arXiv preprint arXiv:1507.03197 (2015).		# Zhu, Jianwei, Haicang Zhang, Chao Wang, Bin Ling, Wei-Mou Zheng and Dongbo Bu. [https://arxiv.org/abs/1507.03197 TOPO: Improving remote homologue recognition via identifying common protein structure framework]. arXiv preprint arXiv:1507.03197 (2015).

			== References ==
	{{Reflist}}		{{Reflist}}

Al Piskun: first light

2026-06-29T23:20:37Z

first light

New page

{{Infobox software
| name = CAS@home
| logo = Cas_logo.png
| logo caption = Dark mode version of CAS logo
| screenshot = Protein structure (1).png
| caption = Protein structure prediction, the kind of computation TreeThreader performed on CAS@home
| description = CAS@home was a completed Chinese volunteer computing project hosted by the Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, best known for running the TreeThreader protein structure prediction application.

| status = Completed
| category = Biology and Medicine
| compute = CPU
| dependencies = None

| developer = Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences
| author = Wu Wenjing
| sponsor = Chinese Academy of Sciences
| maintainer =
| released = {{Start date and age|2010|09|30}}
| completed = {{Start date and age|2020|04|27}}
| discontinued =
| repository =

| programming language = C
| operating system = Windows, Linux
| size =

| stats as of = {{Start date and age|2019|08|08}}
| average performance = 409 GigaFLOPs
| active users = 194
| total users = 16,759
| active hosts = 430
| total hosts = 37,289

| rac =
| credit per day =
| gpu performance = 0
| cpu performance = 1.3 TFLOPS

| website = {{URL|http://casathome.ihep.ac.cn/}}
| license =
}}

'''[https://web.archive.org/web/20200522032208/http://casathome.ihep.ac.cn/ CAS@home]''' ('''Chinese Academy of Sciences at Home''') was a [[volunteer computing]] project built on [[wikipedia:Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing|BOINC]] and hosted by the Computing Centre of the [[wikipedia:Institute of High Energy Physics|Institute of High Energy Physics]] (IHEP), part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Beijing. Launched in 2010, it was the first volunteer computing project based in mainland China, and was created to introduce Chinese researchers to volunteer computing while donating spare processing power from volunteers around the world to scientists at CAS and other Chinese research institutes.<ref name="aboutus">{{Cite web |title=About Us |url=http://casathome.ihep.ac.cn/about_us.php |website=CAS@home |access-date=2026-06-29}}</ref><ref name="slideserve">{{Cite web |title=CAS@home PowerPoint Presentation |url=https://www.slideserve.com/rose-ellison/cas-home |website=SlideServe |access-date=2026-06-29}}</ref> Over its lifetime the project hosted several scientific applications, but it became best known for '''TreeThreader''', a protein structure prediction program developed by researchers at the Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), CAS, which used the donated computing power to identify the most likely three-dimensional shape of a protein from its amino acid sequence.<ref name="slideserve" /><ref name="falconhome" />

== History ==

CAS@home was officially launched in January 2010 with the backing of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and a dedicated BOINC server was established at IHEP during the first quarter of that year.<ref name="boincaustralia">{{Cite web |title=New project: CAS@home |url=https://forum.boinc-australia.net/index.php?board=160.0 |website=BOINC Australia Forum |access-date=2026-06-29}}</ref> A hands-on volunteer computing workshop with international experts and more than twenty participants was held at IHEP on 9 March 2010 to introduce the concept to Chinese researchers.<ref name="amdusers">{{Cite web |title=CAS@home (new BOINC project) |url=http://www.amdusers.com/forum/showthread.php/6392-CAS-Home-(new-BOINC-project) |website=AMDUsers Forum |date=2010-06-28 |access-date=2026-06-29}}</ref> The project itself, announced publicly on the BOINC website on 7 September 2010, described itself as encouraging Chinese scientists to adopt volunteer computing and volunteer thinking for their research, through workshops, pilot applications, and Chinese-language outreach.<ref name="boincnews">{{Cite web |title=New project: CAS@home |url=https://boinc.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=6021 |website=BOINC |publisher=University of California |access-date=2026-06-29}}</ref>

The first application made available on the project was '''SCThread''' (also referred to as Short-Cut Threading), a protein structure prediction tool developed by scientists at the Institute of Computing Technology, CAS, with testing of volunteer jobs beginning in mid-2010.<ref name="amdusers" /><ref name="aboutus" /> Tsinghua University's Centre for Micro and Nano Mechanics also prepared a fluid and solid motion simulation application for the platform, and IHEP physicists worked on an application named BOSS for simulating particle collisions at the [[wikipedia:Beijing Electron-Positron Collider|Beijing Electron-Positron Collider]] (BEPC), using [[wikipedia:VirtualBox|VirtualBox]]-based virtualization.<ref name="amdusers" /><ref name="tsbt">{{Cite web |title=CAS@home project details |url=https://tsbt.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1987 |website=The Scottish Boinc Team |access-date=2026-06-29}}</ref>

The project's day-to-day maintenance and development was coordinated by Wu Wenjing of the IHEP Computing Centre, working with Wu Jie and Kan Wenxiao, under the leadership of Chen Gang, with additional support from David Anderson of the Space Sciences Laboratory at [[wikipedia:University of California, Berkeley|UC Berkeley]], Francois Grey of Tsinghua University and the Citizen Cyberscience Centre at [[wikipedia:CERN|CERN]], and Lei Yang of Tsinghua University.<ref name="aboutus" />

By 2013, the main scientific application running on CAS@home was '''TreeThreader''', a protein structure prediction program written in C by researchers at ICT, which compared an input protein sequence against a library of roughly fifty thousand known protein structural templates to identify the closest match.<ref name="slideserve" /> [[File:Ribbon Structure of MPS1 Protein Kinase.jpg|thumb|A ribbon diagram of a protein's three-dimensional structure, the kind of output TreeThreader generated from an input amino acid sequence]] At that time, the project had accumulated around 23,000 active hosts contributing roughly 1.3 TFLOPS of real-time computing power, with around 10,000 active users (about a third of them from China), and had validated 7 million CPU hours of work since November 2012, with a peak of one million CPU hours validated in a single month.<ref name="slideserve" /> Wu Wenjing of IHEP presented this status update at the BOINC Workshop in Grenoble in 2013.<ref name="slideserve" />

In late 2013 and into 2014, the project ran successive large computing campaigns for TreeThreader, including a batch of fifty thousand protein sequences completed in early 2014, with a further round of around eighty thousand sequences planned to follow.<ref name="casnews1">{{Cite web |title=CAS@home computing schedule |url=http://casathome.ihep.ac.cn/ |website=CAS@home news archive |date=2014-02-12 |access-date=2026-06-29}}</ref> A network problem between ICT and IHEP interrupted job submission for TreeThreader in mid-2013, requiring a temporary pause in job generation while the issue was diagnosed.<ref name="casnews1" />

=== FALCON@home and CASP participation ===

TreeThreader's underlying remote-homologue recognition approach was published by the project's developers as '''TOPO''', a method for improving protein fold recognition by identifying common structural frameworks shared between a query protein and previously solved structures, even when sequence similarity to those structures was low.<ref name="topo">{{Cite web |title=TOPO: Improving remote homologue recognition via identifying common protein structure framework |url=https://arxiv.org/pdf/1507.03197 |website=arXiv |author=Zhu, Jianwei |author2=Zhang, Haicang |author3=Wang, Chao |author4=Ling, Bin |author5=Zheng, Wei-Mou |author6=Bu, Dongbo |date=2015-08-20 |access-date=2026-06-29}}</ref> By extracting the conserved regions of a structural template and aligning the query sequence against those conserved regions rather than against the full-length template, the approach avoided the unreliable alignments that more variable template regions tend to produce in conventional threading methods.<ref name="falconhome" />

This work was deployed as a public-facing service named '''FALCON@home''' (also written FALCON_TOPO), which let biologists worldwide submit their own protein sequences for structure prediction over the web, using CAS@home as its volunteer computing backend.<ref name="casnews2">{{Cite web |title=CAS@home project status |url=http://casathome.ihep.ac.cn/ |website=CAS@home news archive |access-date=2026-06-29}}</ref><ref name="falconhome">{{Cite journal |title=FALCON@home: a high-throughput protein structure prediction server based on remote homologue recognition |author=Wang, Chao |author2=Zhang, Haicang |author3=Zheng, Wei-Mou |author4=Xu, Dong |author5=Zhu, Jianwei |author6=Wang, Bing |author7=Ning, Kang |author8=Sun, Shiwei |author9=Li, Shuai Cheng |author10=Bu, Dongbo |journal=[https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btv581 Bioinformatics] |volume=32 |issue=3 |pages=462 to 464 |year=2016 |doi=10.1093/bioinformatics/btv581 |pmid=26454278}}</ref> At its peak the service drew on more than twenty thousand volunteer CPUs and was able to process over a thousand protein sequences per day, a throughput its developers presented as a way to keep up with the rapidly growing number of protein sequences in need of structural annotation.<ref name="falconhome" />

In the 11th [[wikipedia:Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction|Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction]] (CASP11) in 2014, the FALCON@home-based server FALCON_TOPO was ranked 12th in the template-based modeling category and 17th in the free modeling category among competing structure prediction groups, while an enhanced variant called FALCON_EnvFold was ranked 9th in the template-based modeling category.<ref name="falconhome" /> Prediction quality in CASP is commonly assessed using the TM-score, a measure of structural similarity between a predicted model and the experimentally solved structure that ranges from 0 to 1:

<math>\text{TM-score} = \max\left[\frac{1}{L_{target}}\sum_{i=1}^{L_{aligned}}\frac{1}{1+\left(\frac{d_i}{d_0}\right)^2}\right]</math>

where <math>L_{target}</math> is the number of residues in the target protein, <math>L_{aligned}</math> is the number of aligned residue pairs, <math>d_i</math> is the distance between the <math>i</math>th pair of aligned residues, and <math>d_0</math> is a length-dependent scaling factor. For one CASP11 target the developers highlighted as an example of FALCON@home's strength in remote homologue identification, the server's prediction reached a TM-score of 0.84 against the experimentally determined structure.<ref name="falconhome" /> The developers also used FALCON@home to predict structures for 6,033 mouse proteins in six days, including hundreds of mitochondrial proteins, and reported a strong negative correlation between a protein's surface residue ratio and its half-life, suggesting the platform's usefulness for large-scale proteome-wide studies as well as individual structure prediction.<ref name="falconhome" />

=== Decline and retirement ===

After the large TreeThreader campaign completed in October 2015, the project's computing activity slowed considerably, with only sporadic batches of around two hundred sequences processed each month, largely driven by submissions through the FALCON public service rather than dedicated CAS@home campaigns.<ref name="casnews2" /> A further TreeThreader campaign was planned between February and May 2016 to help prepare results ahead of that year's CASP competition.<ref name="casnews2" /> No further public updates were issued after this period, and the project's website and BOINC server eventually went offline.<ref name="retired">{{Cite web |title=CAS@home retired |url=https://www.tsbt.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=33741 |website=The Scottish Boinc Team |access-date=2026-06-29}}</ref> [[wikipedia:BOINCstats|BOINCstats]], a cross-project statistics tracker, subsequently marked CAS@home as a retired project once its scheduler stopped responding.<ref name="retired" />

== Scientific publications ==

# Wang, Chao, Haicang Zhang, Wei-Mou Zheng, Dong Xu, Jianwei Zhu, Bing Wang, Kang Ning, Shiwei Sun, Shuai Cheng Li and Dongbo Bu. [https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btv581 FALCON@home: a high-throughput protein structure prediction server based on remote homologue recognition]. ''Bioinformatics'' 32, no. 3 (2016): 462 to 464.
# Zhu, Jianwei, Haicang Zhang, Chao Wang, Bin Ling, Wei-Mou Zheng and Dongbo Bu. [https://arxiv.org/abs/1507.03197 TOPO: Improving remote homologue recognition via identifying common protein structure framework]. arXiv preprint arXiv:1507.03197 (2015).

{{Reflist}}

[[Category:Completed BOINC projects]]
[[Category:Biology and Medicine projects]]
[[Category:BOINC projects hosted in China]]

CAS@home - Revision history

Al Piskun at 18:18, 3 July 2026

Al Piskun: /* Scientific publications */ clarify

Al Piskun at 23:26, 29 June 2026

Al Piskun: first light