Imagination Technologies Limited

Patent Trials and Appeals Board

Jan 28, 2022

2020005732 (P.T.A.B. Jan. 28, 2022)

UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE United States Patent and Trademark Office Address: COMMISSIONER FOR PATENTS P.O. Box 1450 Alexandria, Virginia 22313-1450 www.uspto.gov APPLICATION NO. FILING DATE FIRST NAMED INVENTOR ATTORNEY DOCKET NO. CONFIRMATION NO. 15/236,148 08/12/2016 Steven John Clohset 2645-0112US02 1436 125968 7590 01/28/2022 Potomac Law Group PLLC (IMGTEC) 8229 Boone Boulevard Suite 430 Vienna, VA 22182 EXAMINER TEETS, BRADLEY A ART UNIT PAPER NUMBER 2195 NOTIFICATION DATE DELIVERY MODE 01/28/2022 ELECTRONIC Please find below and/or attached an Office communication concerning this application or proceeding. The time period for reply, if any, is set in the attached communication. Notice of the Office communication was sent electronically on above-indicated "Notification Date" to the following e-mail address(es): Eofficeaction@appcoll.com Patents@potomaclaw.com vdeluca@potomaclaw.com PTOL-90A (Rev. 04/07) UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE BEFORE THE PATENT TRIAL AND APPEAL BOARD Ex parte STEVEN JOHN CLOHSET, JAMES ALEXANDER MCCOMBE, and LUKE TILMAN PETERSON Appeal 2020-005732 Application 15/236,148 Technology Center 2100 Before MAHSHID D. SAADAT, ALLEN R. MacDONALD, and NABEEL U. KHAN, Administrative Patent Judges. SAADAT, Administrative Patent Judge. DECISION ON APPEAL STATEMENT OF THE CASE Pursuant to 35 U.S.C. § 134(a), Appellant1 appeals from the Examiner’s decision to reject claims 1-20. We have jurisdiction under 35 U.S.C. § 6(b). We affirm. 1 We use the word Appellant to refer to “applicant” as defined in 37 C.F.R. § 1.42(a). Appellant identifies the real party in interest as Imagination Technologies Limited. Appeal Br. 1. Appeal 2020-005732 Application 15/236,148 2 CLAIMED SUBJECT MATTER The claims are directed to “components, methods, and systems [for] enabling larger scale, finer grained parallelism of computation tasks.” Spec. ¶ 34. Claim 1, reproduced below, illustrates the claimed subject matter: 1. A machine-implemented method of scheduling computation tasks, comprising: identifying a set of computation tasks to be executed on a plurality of processing units; profiling the computation tasks of the set according to parameters comprising memory access requirements and computation requirements of the computation tasks; grouping instances of the computation tasks for execution into groups by using said profiling of the computation tasks to identify computation tasks to be grouped together on the basis that they have memory access requirements and computation requirements that enable them to be executed in a group; and scheduling groupings of computation tasks to be executed on the plurality of processing units. Appeal Br. 12 (emphasis added). REFERENCES The prior art relied upon by the Examiner is: Name Reference Date Miller et al. US 7,389,506 B1 June 17, 2008 Ferstl et al. US 2004/0044718 A1 Mar. 4, 2004 Nickolls et al. US 7,788,468 B1 Aug. 31, 2010 Han et al. US 2003/0052878 A1 Mar. 20, 2003 Vance et al. US 6,966,061 B1 Nov. 15, 2005 Benedetti et al. US 2005/0076043 A1 Apr. 7, 2005 Dubey et al. US 5,812,811 Sept. 22, 1998 Appeal 2020-005732 Application 15/236,148 3 REJECTIONS Claims 1, 10-14, and 18 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being unpatentable over Miller and Ferstl. See Final Act. 2-15. Claims 2, 3, 6, 16, 17, and 20 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being unpatentable over Miller, Ferstl, and Nickolls. See Final Act. 15- 20. Claim 4 stands rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being unpatentable over Miller, Ferstl, Nickolls, and Applicant Admitted Prior Art (“AAPA”). See Final Act. 20-23. Claim 5 stands rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being unpatentable over Miller, Ferstl, Nickolls, AAPA, and Han. See Final Act. 23-24. Claims 7 and 19 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being unpatentable over Miller, Ferstl, and Vance. See Final Act. 24-27. Claims 8 and 15 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being unpatentable over Miller, Ferstl, and Benedetti. See Final Act. 27-29. Claim 9 stands rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being unpatentable over Miller, Ferstl, and Dubey. See Final Act. 29-30. ANALYSIS We have reviewed the Examiner’s rejections under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) in light of Appellant’s arguments in Appellant’s Appeal Brief and Reply Brief that the Examiner has erred. We are unpersuaded by Appellant’s contentions and concur with the findings and conclusions reached by the Examiner as explained below. The Examiner finds the combination of Miller and Ferstl teaches or suggests all the elements of independent claim 1. See Final Act. 2-6. More Appeal 2020-005732 Application 15/236,148 4 specifically, the Examiner finds Miller’s cellular multiprocessor (“CMP”) system that affinitizes a thread (i.e., assigns the thread to a processor or a cluster of processors) based on a usage status (i.e., memory usage and/or processor usage) of the thread, teaches or suggests “parameters comprising memory access requirements and computation requirements of the computation tasks,” “grouping instances of the computation tasks for execution into groups by using said [memory access requirements and computation requirements] of the computation tasks to identify computation tasks to be grouped together on the basis that they have memory access requirements and computation requirements that enable them to be executed in a group,” and “scheduling groupings of computation tasks to be executed on [a] plurality of processing units,” as recited in claim 1. See Final Act. 3- 4 (citing Miller 3:13-21, 6:33-40, 8:8-59); see also Ans. 5-6 (citing Miller 8:10-13, 8:19-37, 8:48-59). The Examiner finds Miller does not specifically teach creating task profiles representative of the memory access and computation requirements, but relies on Ferstl as teaching a selection operation based on a job profile specifying requirements in association with a computing job, where the requirements include a memory capacity required for an execution of the computing job and a number of processing units required for suitable execution of the computing job. See Final Act. 4-5 (citing Ferstl ¶¶ 11, 14, 121). The Examiner concludes it would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art to combine Ferstl’s job profiling with Miller’s system resulting in a system in which the groups of tasks disclosed in Miller are grouped based upon task profiling as disclosed in Ferstl. See Ans. 5. According to the Examiner, a person of ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated to make this combination, with a reasonable expectation of Appeal 2020-005732 Application 15/236,148 5 success, for the purpose of increasing system available and efficiency while improving a selection of computing resources for handling each job as disclosed in Ferstl. See Ans. 5-6 (citing Ferstl ¶¶ 3, 5, 102, 122). Appellant argues Miller merely describes affinitizing a thread to a group of processor rather than grouping instances of computation tasks for execution into groups. See Appeal Br. 6-8, 10; see also Reply Br. 1-3. In other words, Appellant argues affinitizing two threads to the same cluster of processors does not correspond to grouping tasks together for execution in a group because Miller describes that single threads are affinitized to processors one-by-one, such that the threads are executed one-by-one rather than as a group. See Appeal Br. 7. We are not persuaded by Appellant’s argument. We agree with the Examiner that, in Miller, when two threads are affinitized to the same cluster of processors based on usage status (including memory usage and processor usage), those threads are also grouped together based on usage status. See Ans. 7. In other words, Miller’s disclosure of affinitizing threads to a cluster of processors teaches both grouping the threads on the basis of memory usage and processor usage and scheduling the grouping of the threads on the cluster of processors. See id. We further agree with the Examiner that claim 1 does not requires that all instances of computational tasks be grouped together before any of the instances of computer tasks are scheduled. See id. at 8-10. Thus, Appellant’s argument does not persuasively distinguish the claimed “grouping instances of the computation tasks,” and “scheduling groupings of computation tasks to be executed on a plurality of processing units,” from Miller’s disclosure. Appellant further argues Ferstl merely describes using a job profile to select a suitable processing element, or to specify a job handler, in order to perform a computing job, and does not teach profiling computation tasks in Appeal 2020-005732 Application 15/236,148 6 order to group computation task instances into a group for execution as a group. See Appeal Br. 9-10; see also Reply Br. 4-5. We are not persuaded by this argument as well. We agree with the Examiner that Appellant’s argument regarding Ferstl pertains to a limitation of claim 1 that the Examiner relied upon Miller rather than Ferstl as teaching (i.e., “grouping instances of the computation tasks”). See Ans. 12. Thus, Appellant’s argument does not address the Examiner’s proposed combination of Miller and Ferstl. One cannot show non-obviousness by attacking references individually when the rejection is based on a combination of references. See In re Merck & Co., Inc., 800 F.2d 1091, 1097 (Fed. Cir. 1986); see also In re Keller, 642 F.2d 413, 425 (CCPA 1981). Appellant additionally argues there is no motivation to make the proposed combination because applying the actual teaching of Ferstl to Miller would merely result in Miller’s system selecting a job handler to handle a computing job. See Appeal Br. 8-9; see also Reply Br. 4-5. This argument is not persuasive either. The Examiner has articulated a sufficient rationale for combining Miller and Ferstl for the reasons provided by the Examiner in the Final Office Action and Examiner’s Answer. See Final Act. 5-6; see also Ans. 12-13. In light of the above, we are not persuaded that the Examiner erred in finding the combination of Miller and Ferstl renders obvious independent claim 1. No separate arguments are presented for either the other independent claims or the dependent claims. See Appeal Br. 10. Accordingly, we sustain the rejection of claims 1-20 under 35 U.S.C. § 103. Appeal 2020-005732 Application 15/236,148 7 DECISION SUMMARY In summary: Claim(s) Rejected 35 U.S.C. § Reference(s)/Basis Affirmed Reversed 1, 10-14, 18 103(a) Miller, Ferstl 1, 10-14, 18 2, 3, 6, 16, 17, 20 103(a) Miller, Ferstl, Nickolls 2, 3, 6, 16, 17, 20 4 103(a) Miller, Ferstl, AAPA 4 5 103(a) Miller, Ferstl, AAPA, Han 5 7, 19 103(a) Miller, Ferstl, Vance 7, 19 8, 15 103(a) Miller, Ferstl, Benedetti 8, 15 9 103(a) Miller, Ferstl, Dubey 9 Overall Outcome 1-20 TIME PERIOD FOR RESPONSE No time period for taking any subsequent action in connection with this appeal may be extended under 37 C.F.R. § 1.136(a). See 37 C.F.R. § 1.136(a)(1)(iv). AFFIRMED