BERLIN, Dec. 14 (Xinhua) -- The Bavarian Academy of Sciences signed a contract in Munich on Thursday for delivery of what could be the world's third fastest supercomputer.

The "SuperMUC-NG" computer is scheduled to be delivered to the Academy's Leibniz SuperComputer Centre in Barching near Munich in October 2018. SuperMUC-NG will possess 300,000 computation kernels, boasting a theoretical performance, called Rpeak, of 26.7 Petaflops.

SuperMUC-NG's is chiefly intended to be used for the analysis of extremely-large data volumes (Big Data) which requires complex simulations.

Like its predecessor at the Leibniz SuperComputer Centre, "SuperMUC-NG" will be cooled with 45 centigrade warm water.

"Handling gigantic data volumes is one of the key challenges of the future", Hannes Schwaderer, manager at Intel Germany, commented on the news.

"Making use of this data requires an enormous computation power", Schwaderer added.

The SuperComputer currently at use in Barching is already one of the world's most powerful computation devices and is primarily employed in areas such as cosmology, astrophysics, solid-state physics and fluid mechanics. In the future, its successor will also be applied to run simulations on earthquakes, vehicle engineering and the treatment of diseases such as cancer.