China Working Committee for High Performance Computer Standardization and China

Electronic Standardization Institute have jointly established on May 9, 2008 a laboratory to

evaluate high performance computers' energy consumption. The lab is mandated to test

and accredit energy consumption of high performance computers in the marketplace.

According to a briefing, in 2007, electronic and information products have consumed

300-500 million kilowatt hours of electricity in China, which is equivalent to an annual

output from the Three Gorge Power Plant. Of the electricity consumed by electronic and

information products, high performance computers, servers, and data centers have taken

the lion's share. According to statistics provided by the Ministry of Information Industry, a

supercomputer with 1 billion floating-point operations per second would have an electricity

bill approaching RMB 5 million. Data centers in the country have registered an annual

growth of power consumption by 15%-20%.

To make high performance computers more energy efficient, China Working Committee for

High Performance Computer Standardization has established in the early 2008 a project

panel to deal with high performance computers' energy saving standards. Shanghai Lanqi

S&T Co. Ltd., a member of the project, has developed a novel AMB chip, which can save

energy by 30%?50%, when installed on FBD internal memory. In the last six months, the

panel has worked out basic energy consumption standards for chip, system, application,

and configuration.