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China's Ministry of Information Industry plans to introduce soon a set of new energy-saving standards on the country's contingent of high performance computers.

The decision comes in light of the huge power consumption of high performance computers although they boast extra-super calculating capacities.

Xinhua News Agency reported that the ministry is joining hands with China Electronics Standardisation Association in working out the standards which will demand super computer manufacturers and users follow rules on energy-saving technologies and make their to-be-products or finished products more energy efficient.

Officials with the ministry said that the energy-saving standards will relate to aspects, including making CMOS chips, power supply management, and product tests and evaluations more energy-saving.

Nowadays, high performance computers are vital for national security and economic development, they are also a favourite in national defence, information safety, oil exploitation, weather forecasting and scientific and commercial calculations, not to mention biological medical research and engineering simulations.

According to statistics from the ministry, a computing centre with the capacity of 1 billion times calculation per second consumes four million yuan worth of electricity a year.

Servers in American data centres, for instance, consumed 1.2 percent of the country's total electricity consumption in 2005, which was worth 2.7 billion US dollars.

With more energy-saving technologies introduced, China's Ministry of Information Industry says, it is expected that by 2010, high performance computers worldwide will be able to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that will be equivalent to exhaust from eleven million cars or gas emissions from twenty 500-Megawatts coal-power plants.