Interrupts do not exist at the application level (only the kernel manages them, and indeed it is getting a lot of timer interrupts already). You can have signals, timers, and delaying syscalls (notably poll ornanosleep). Read Advanced Linux Programming.
Read first the time(7) man page. Then timer_create(2), poll(2), timerfd_create(2), setitimer(2),sigaction(2), nanosleep(2), clock_gettime(2) etc....
Some kernels can also be configured to have watchdog timers...