The Machine is a single bank of memory that can process enormous amounts of information and is a custom-built device made for the era of big data. HPE said it has created the world's largest single-memory computer.

The R&D program is the largest in the history of HPE, the former enterprise division of HP that split apart from the consumer-focused division.

If the project works, it could be transformative for society if HPE can get together the software to run it.

The prototype unveiled today contains 160 terabytes (TB) of memory, capable of simultaneously working with the data held in every book in the Library of Congress five times over -- or approximately 160 million books.

It has never been possible to hold and manipulate whole data sets of this size in a single-memory system, and this is just a glimpse of the immense potential of Memory-Driven Computing, HPE said.

Based on the current prototype, HPE expects the architecture could easily scale to an exabyte-scale single-memory system and, beyond that, to a nearly limitless pool of memory -- 4,096 yottabytes.

For context, that is 250,000 times the entire digital universe today.