See Guiem Bernat's tutorial at ESS'08 entitled "Timing Matters: Optimising the worst-case execution time"

Rapita Systems' CEO, Dr. Guiem Bernat, will be giving a technical presentation entitled, "Timing matters: Optimising the worst-case execution time." "How long does my software take to run...and how can I reduce it?" are key issues for embedded engineers designing reliable systems. Understanding, verifying, and improving the timing performance of their real-time products gives successful companies in the avionics, telecommunications, space, and automotive electronics industries a key competitive edge. Today, software timing analysis doesn't have to be guesswork. This presentation addresses two key aspects of real-time systems performance:

1. How to gain a clear, detailed, and accurate understanding of the execution time behaviour of real-time embedded software.
2. How to target optimisation effort precisely where it will have the maximum benefit in improving system timing behaviour, for the minimum cost.

This presentation will cover key aspects of real-time systems: finding worst case execution times (WCET) and the worst case path, and why worst case optimization is not the same as average execution optimization. Practical issues of looking for the worst-case "hot-spots", identifying timing bugs and verifying optimisation opportunities will be explained with examples of worst case optimizations.