Quill said some firms are turning to cross-asset trading because the high frequency trading (HFT) business is now dominated by ultra high frequency trading firms whose massive investments in sophisticated hardware like FPGAs has made it difficult for smaller players to compete.

FORBES: Chicago's Sun Trading Consolidates Asset Classes on Kx

Then there was the North Yorkshire community school which had turned the Pi into an RFID (radio-frequency identification) reader to measure lap times in their cross-country races, and the London independent school whose pupils had come up with Teacher's Pet, a way of delivering homework via USB sticks plugged into the tiny computer.

BBC: The life of Pi - clever ideas with a tiny computer