Page "Real-time computing" Paragraph 22

Real-time computing is sometimes misunderstood to be high-performance computing, but this is not always the case.

For example, a massive supercomputer executing a scientific simulation may offer impressive performance, yet it is not executing a real-time computation.

Conversely, once the hardware and software for an anti-lock braking system has been designed to meet its required deadlines, no further performance gains are obligatory.

Furthermore, if a network server is highly loaded with network traffic, its response time may be slower but will ( in most cases ) still succeed before it times out ( hits its deadline ).

Hence, such a network server would not be considered a real-time system: temporal failures ( delays, time-outs, etc.

) are typically small and compartmentalized ( limited in effect ) but are not catastrophic failures.

In a real-time system, such as the FTSE 100 Index, a slow-down beyond limits would often be considered catastrophic in its application context.

Therefore, the most important requirement of a real-time system is predictability and not performance.