1. A method for establishing a bound on the execution time of an application due to task interference in an instruction cache shared by a plurality of tasks, said method comprising the steps of: determining a number of live frames of said application that are coexistent during execution of said application; and establishing said bound based on said number of live frames of a set-associative cache, wherein said bound is suitable for use in allocating processing resources, wherein one or more steps of said method are performed by at least one hardware device, wherein said step of establishing said bound further comprises the steps of determining an effect of an interrupt at each possible interrupt point and establishing said bound based on a maximum of said effect of an interrupt at each possible interrupt point.