A large part of safety-critical embedded systems has to satisfy hard real-time constraints. These need sound methods and tools to derive reliable run-time guarantees. The guaranteed run times should not only be reliable, but also precise. The achievable precision highly depends on characteristics of the target architecture and system layers of the software. Trends in hardware and software design run contrary to predictability. The talk describes our methods for timing analysis, the threats to timing predictability of systems and proposes design principles that support timing predictability. The ultimate goal is to design performant systems with sharp upper and lower bounds on execution times.

Professor Reinhard Wilhelm was born on June 5, 1946 in Deutmecke, Westfalia. In 1965 - 1972 he studied mathematics, physics and mathematical logic at Westfalische Wilhelms-Universitat Munster, and computer science at Technical University Munchen and Stanford University. In 1977 he obtained a Dr. rer. nat. degree from Technical University Munchen, and since 1978 is Professor at Saarland University in Saarbrucken where he holds the Chair for Programming Languages and Compiler Construction. Since its establishment in 1990, he is Scientific Director of the International Conference and Research Center for Computer Science in Schloss Dagstuhl, which is the world's premier venue of computer science. He is a cofounder of the spin-off company AbsInt, developer of world-leading tools for software quality assurance.

ACM made him ACM Fellow in 2002. The Technical University Darmstadt and the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics awarded him the Alwin Walther Medal in 2006. The French Minister of Research awarded him the Gay-Lussac-Humboldt Award forn outstanding scientific contributions and successful French-German research cooperation in 2007. Since 2008 he is a member of Academia Europea.

Professor Wilhelm's main academic interests are programming languages, compiler construction, static program analysis, embedded real-time systems and algorithm animation. He has authored several books and published numerous articles and is reputed as one of the leading scholars in the field. His book "Compiler Design" has been published in German, French, and English, and is widely used in graduate and undergraduate compiler courses worldwide. His works on attribute grammars have had high impact in the development of compiler-generation systems and on program transformation and optimization. He had been a pioneer of logic-based program analysis by using a 3-valued logic in a novel way to analyze dynamic data structures. His recent works on timing analysis for real-time systems had resulted of important software validation applications in avionics industry.