Is "real-time" a term known to every English speaker?

Real-time is a common term in engineering texts. It means a system that produces output within a very tight deadline. I am writing a proposal to be read by non-engineers. I just wonder if it is clear to everybody to say: "the algorithm needs to be fast to produce the results in real-time"?

Edit: The problem is that this is a one-page proposal and the guys who are going to read it might be from social or bio sciences. So, I don't have enough space to define everything. I can replace "real-time" by something like "fast". But I just want to keep the things a bit technical but understandable to everybody.

Solution 1:

Maybe I'm a little geeky, but I understand what real time means. It is not a synonym for fast. First let's agree on what it means:
OED noun the actual time during which a process or event occurs
[as modifier] (real-time) Computing relating to a system in which input data is processed within milliseconds so that it is available virtually immediately as feedback to the process from which it is coming.

In your case, you could gloss immediately, at once, right away for the adverbial phrase in real time: the algorithm needs to be fast to produce the results "in real-time" (right away, at once, immediately).

Solution 2:

Even in software engineering it's not widely known, or even uniformaly defined. To embedded systems people it means that the result must be computed in a certain time or it's useless - to other people it simply means that the answer is produced 'live' or essentially immediately rather than offline