Adaptive Dispatch: A Pattern for Performance-Aware Software Self-Adaptation

Modern software systems often employ dynamic adaptation to runtime conditions in some parts of their functionality -- well known examples range from autotuning of computing kernels through adaptive battery saving strategies of mobile applications to dynamic load balancing and failover functionality in computing clouds. Typically, the implementation of these features is problem-specific -- a particular autotuner, a particular load balancer, and so on -- and enjoys little support from the implementation environment beyond standard programming constructs. In this work, we propose Adaptive Dispatch as a generic coding pattern for implementing dynamic adaptation. We believe that such pattern can make the implementation of dynamic adaptation features better in multiple aspects -- an explicit adaptation construct makes the presence of adaptation easily visible to programmers, lends itself to manipulation with development tools, and facilitates coordination of adaptation behavior at runtime. We present an implementation of the Adaptive Dispatch pattern as an internal DSL in Scala.