Millions of personal computers sit idly on desks and in homes worldwide.  During this idle time, the
    mysteries of science and space continue to elude us.  What if each of the world’s estimated 650 million
    PCs could be linked to focus on humanity’s most pressing issues?

    To make this vision a reality, Communities In Schools of the San Fernando Valley has become a partner
    of World Community Grid, joining the IBM Corporation and a group of more than 230 companies,
    associations, foundations, nonprofits and academic institutions.  Communities In Schools of the San
    Fernando Valley is encouraging our community to contribute their idle PC time to assist humanitarian
    research by joining World Community Grid at www.worldcommunitygrid.org and then becoming a
    member of their team.

    World Community Grid uses grid technology to establish a permanent, flexible infrastructure that
    provides researchers with a readily available pool of computational power that can be used to solve
    problems plaguing humanity.  Grid technology joins together many individual computers, creating a
    large system with massive computational power that far exceeds the power of a few supercomputers.  
    Importantly, World Community Grid is easy and safe to use.  

    To join, individuals should go to www.worldcommunitygrid.org and simply download and install a free,
    small software program on their computers.  When idle, your computers request data from World
    Community Grid’s server.  Computers then perform computations using this data, send the results back
    to the server and prompt it for a new piece of work.

    “World Community Grid provides our busy community with an efficient and effective way to make a
    difference on problems that plague humanity,” said Robert Arias, CIS President.

    CIS Executive Director William Rodriguez went further saying, “We are asking individuals to join
    World Community Grid as part of our overall efforts to enrich the lives of our communities.”

    In its first year, World Community Grid ran the Human Proteome Folding Project, which provided
    scientists with data on how individual proteins within the human body affect human health, enabling
    them to develop new cures for diseases like lyme disease, malaria and tuberculosis.  Scientists now have
    descriptions of 120,000 protein domains that are critical to human well-being; without the benefit of this
    free grid technology, it would have taken 5 years to get these results, compared with just 12 months on
    World Community Grid.

    On November 21, 2005 World Community Grid launched FightAIDS@Home.  FightAIDS@Home, which
    is sponsored by The Scripps Research Institute, is using computational methods to identify new
    candidate drugs to block HIV protease, a key molecular structure that when blocked, stops the virus
    from maturing and thus is a way of avoiding the onset of AIDS and prolonging life.

    On July 20, 2006, World Community Grid launched a new effort that will assist in cancer research using
    the massive computational power of World Community Grid.  The Help Defeat Cancer project will use
    World Community Grid to analyze tissue microarrays (TMA) – a new investigative tool that will
    ultimately help doctors select proper treatments and provide accurate prognosis for cancer patients.  

    Please go to www.worldcommunitygrid.org and become a member today and then join our team.
Communities In Schools - Championing the connection of needed community resources with schools to help young people learn, stay in school, and prepare for life.