Real-time Systems

Real-time Systems are computing systems that must process inputs and produce outputs within strict, bounded time constraints — where missing a deadline can cause system failure. They span hard real-time systems (airbags, flight control, medical devices) where any deadline miss is catastrophic, and soft real-time systems (video streaming, gaming) where occasional latency is tolerable. Core concerns include scheduling algorithms, task prioritization, deterministic latency, and operating system kernels designed for predictable timing.

As AI moves to the edge — autonomous vehicles, robotics, industrial automation, and wearables — models must run inference within strict latency budgets on resource-constrained hardware, making real-time systems expertise essential. Companies building LLM-serving infrastructure increasingly need engineers who can reason about worst-case execution time, scheduling policies, and hardware-software co-design to meet SLA guarantees. The intersection of generative AI and real-time constraints is an actively growing research area attracting significant industry investment.