Abstract: Many real-time cyber-physical systems (CPSs) must satisfy timing constraints to ensure safe operation. Thus, these CPSs should be tested for temporal correctness before their real-world deployment.  Additionally, these CPSs must operate within strict size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C) constraints.  To satisfy these SWaP-C requirements, the test for timing correctness should be “exact,” meaning that no system that meets timing constraints should fail the test. Unfortunately, deriving an exact test for emerging CPSs is challenging due to the complexity of artificial intelligence-enabled workloads and highly parallel hardware platforms. In this talk, I will show how simulation-based exact tests can be devised for systems with or without dataflow dependencies under common real-time scheduling policies. I will also discuss how to exactly (or ‘almost’ exactly) account for delays due to accessing mutually exclusive shared resources by resolving mysteries around optimal locking protocols.  Finally, I will briefly discuss my work on parallelizable tasks that require co-scheduling of threads.