There's at least one company using it for algorithmic trading, although I don't know the details of how they're using it.
Storm isn't intended for sub-millisecond type processing, but latencies on the order of milliseconds is certainly doable on Storm. Obviously a lot of that depends on how complex your processing is.
Thanks Nathan. The sort of latency that we are working with is in the order of milliseconds. There are many HFT shops out there that have invested in FPGAs or other hardware based solutions to get sub millisecond latencies for processing incoming data. I think they are fairly specialized firms.
Currently we are using a proprietary CEP platform that has issues with scaling as the number of deployed models (i.e. data consumers) goes up.
Storm's topology based approach maybe worth some investigation because it would allow the addition of more compute nodes transparently as our needs expand. I will take a more detailed look.
By the nature of the business, most of these shops are secretive. But there are some technology vendors out there building products based on FPGAs. Stone Ridge Technology is one of them (I saw an article in magazine, have no experience myself)! I have heard that FPGAs are mainly use to parse and normalize incoming market data. For example a data feed coming from NYSE in the ITCH format.
Other hedge funds are also using hardware based solutions. But more likely GPU based solutions for number crunching.
If you are interested I would recommend checking out the forums at wilmott.com or at the Nuclear Phynance [sic] board. Wilmott magazine also has had a few articles on models written in CUDA for pricing options etc.
Storm isn't intended for sub-millisecond type processing, but latencies on the order of milliseconds is certainly doable on Storm. Obviously a lot of that depends on how complex your processing is.