Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Claim Objections
Claims 1 and 17 are objected to because of the following informalities: several portions of the claim lack spaces between separate words. Appropriate correction is required.
Claim 9 is objected to because of the following informalities: There should be a comma after “pairs.” Appropriate correction is required.
Claim Interpretation
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112(f):
(f) Element in Claim for a Combination. – An element in a claim for a combination may be expressed as a means or step for performing a specified function without the recital of structure, material, or acts in support thereof, and such claim shall be construed to cover the corresponding structure, material, or acts described in the specification and equivalents thereof.
The following is a quotation of pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph:
An element in a claim for a combination may be expressed as a means or step for performing a specified function without the recital of structure, material, or acts in support thereof, and such claim shall be construed to cover the corresponding structure, material, or acts described in the specification and equivalents thereof.
This application includes one or more claim limitations that do not use the word “means,” but are nonetheless being interpreted under 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph, because the claim limitation(s) uses a generic placeholder that is coupled with functional language without reciting sufficient structure to perform the recited function and the generic placeholder is not preceded by a structural modifier. Such claim limitation(s) is/are: the “scheduling constraints injection entity,” “constraints dispatcher,” “validity constraint builder,” “built-in optimization constraints entity,” “external constraint builder,” and “prioritized scheduling constraint system builder,” in claims 1, 6, 9-11, and 15.
Because this/these claim limitation(s) is/are being interpreted under 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph, it/they is/are being interpreted to cover the corresponding structure described in the specification as performing the claimed function, and equivalents thereof.
If applicant does not intend to have this/these limitation(s) interpreted under 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph, applicant may: (1) amend the claim limitation(s) to avoid it/them being interpreted under 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph (e.g., by reciting sufficient structure to perform the claimed function); or (2) present a sufficient showing that the claim limitation(s) recite(s) sufficient structure to perform the claimed function so as to avoid it/them being interpreted under 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
In the event the determination of the status of the application as subject to AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103 (or as subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103) is incorrect, any correction of the statutory basis (i.e., changing from AIA to pre-AIA ) for the rejection will not be considered a new ground of rejection if the prior art relied upon, and the rationale supporting the rejection, would be the same under either status.
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
The factual inquiries for establishing a background for determining obviousness under 35 U.S.C. 103 are summarized as follows:
1. Determining the scope and contents of the prior art.
2. Ascertaining the differences between the prior art and the claims at issue.
3. Resolving the level of ordinary skill in the pertinent art.
4. Considering objective evidence present in the application indicating obviousness or nonobviousness.
Claim(s) 1-3, 5, and 16-20 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Meister (US 11,372,629) and further in view of Bowers (US 2016/0358103).
Regarding claim 1, Meister teaches: A data processing apparatus, comprising:
a processing circuitry (col. 5:22-24, “The system includes a first processor and a first memory in electrical communication with the first processor”);
a scheduling constraints injection entity (col. 14:46-47, “Lines 3 and 4 build permutation constraints into the clamping formulation”); and
a polyhedral scheduler (col. 5:18-19, “The scheduler may be a polyhedral scheduler”);
wherein the scheduling constraints injection entity is configured to cooperate with the processing circuitry to adapt a polyhedral intermediate representation of an input code for obtaining an adapted polyhedral intermediate representation of the input code (col. 8:43-47, “Given an input code, a generalized dependence graph (GDG) is constructed. This is a directed multigraph in which nodes represent statements and edges represent dependences”), based on one or more scheduling constraints (col. 8:34-37, “The polyhedral abstraction represents program semantics in a concise, mathematical way through sets of affine constraints that make up the faces of a polyhedron”);
wherein the polyhedral scheduler is configured to cooperate with the processing circuitry to generate, based on the adapted polyhedral intermediate representation of the input code, a scheduled polyhedral intermediate representation of the input code (col. 10:32-34, “The second stage identifies an optimal schedule by solving an ILP problem within the set of legal schedules”); and
wherein the scheduling constraints injection entity is further configured to cooperate with the processing circuitry to adjust the polyhedral scheduler, based on the one or more scheduling constraints (col. 10:34-37, “Finally, additional constraints are added to the space of legal solutions to ensure that all subsequent schedules are linearly independent with the schedule found in stage two”).
Meister does not teach as clearly as Bowers teaches: a scheduling constraints injection entity (¶ 83, “The workflow execution engine can parse and traverses the textual representation 720 to produce an operator interdependency graph 710”).
It would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art, at the effective filing date of the invention, to have applied the known technique of a scheduling constraints injection entity, as taught by Bowers, in the same way to the data processing apparatus as taught by Meister. Both inventions are in the field of constraint based scheduling, and combining them would have predictably resulted in “enables the work authoring tool to parse textual representation of a workflow (e.g., a machine learning workflow),” as indicated by Bowers (¶ 64).
Regarding claim 2, Meister teaches: The data processing apparatus of claim 1, wherein the scheduling constraints injection entity is configured to cooperate with the processing circuitry to adjust the polyhedral scheduler (col. 5:31-34, “The instructions further program the processing unit, for scheduling operations defined by the first statement at a first dimension of the first loop nest”), based on the one or more scheduling constraints and the polyhedral intermediate representation of the input code (col. 5:34-37, “to select a first statement grouping that includes the first statement, and to specify constraints that limit a scheduler to applying to the first statement grouping loop fusion or loop permutation transforms only”).
Regarding claim 3, Meister teaches: The data processing apparatus of claim 1, wherein the processing circuitry is further configured to process the input code into an executable output code based on the scheduled polyhedral intermediate representation of the input code (col. 1:34-37, “The source program (simply “program,” hereinafter) is compiled by a compiler to obtain an executable that can be executed to perform the operations specified in the program”).
Regarding claim 5, Bowers teaches: The data processing apparatus of claim 1, wherein the one or more scheduling constraints are defined by one or more text files, binary files and/or encoded files (¶ 28, “By parsing the workflow definition (e.g., text formatted according to a workflow definition language), the workflow execution engine can . . . identify machines (e.g., physical devices or virtual devices) to run the operators according to resource constraints explicitly or implicitly defined in the workflow”).
Regarding claim 16, Bowers teaches: The data processing apparatus of claim 1, wherein the polyhedral intermediate representation of the input code comprises one or more affine sets (col. 8:34-37, “The polyhedral abstraction represents program semantics in a concise, mathematical way through sets of affine constraints that make up the faces of a polyhedron”) and/or functions defining iteration domain information (col. 8:47-48, “Statements are represented through their iteration domains and array access functions”), data access information and/or ordering information about the input code.
Claims 17-20 recite commensurate subject matter as claims 1-3. Therefore, they are rejected for the same reasons.
Claim(s) 4 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Meister and Bowers, as applied above, and further in view of Jia (US 2022/0100558).
Regarding claim 4, Meister and Bowers do not teach; however, Jia discloses: a communication interface and/or user interface (¶ 36, “The applications are accessible from various client devices through a thin client interface such as a web browser (e.g., web-based email)”), configured to receive the one or more scheduling constraints and to provide the one or more scheduling constraints to the scheduling constraints injection entity (¶ 96, “a scheduler 701 configured to receive input data 702 including runtime resources requested by a client (e.g., the optimization request at 304), time windows of system availability, operational constraints, and client preferences”).
It would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art, at the effective filing date of the invention, to have applied the known technique of a communication interface and/or user interface, configured to receive the one or more scheduling constraints and to provide the one or more scheduling constraints to the scheduling constraints injection entity, as taught by Jia, in the same way to the injection entity, as taught by Meister and Bowers. Both inventions are in the field of constraint-based scheduling, and combining them would have predictably resulted in “optimizing runtime processes of a system providing shared resources,” as indicated by Jia (¶ 1).
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 6-15 are objected to as being dependent upon a rejected base claim, but would be allowable if rewritten in independent form including all of the limitations of the base claim and any intervening claims.
The following is a statement of reasons for the indication of allowable subject matter:
Regarding claim 6, no reference or combination of references were uncovered that teaches “a constraints dispatcher configured to extract from each of the one or more scheduling constraints a domain information portion and a prioritized scheduling information portion.”
Regarding claim 7, no reference or combination of references were uncovered that teaches “adapt the polyhedral intermediate representation of the input code for obtaining the adapted polyhedral intermediate representation of the input code.”
Regarding claims 8-15, they depend on claims 6 or 7; therefore, they are indicated as allowable for the same reasons.
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure.
Eichenberger (US 2009/0307673) teaches “the known polyhedral loop transformation based approaches by providing mechanisms for performing code generation transformations on individual statement instances in an intermediate representation generated by the polyhedral loop transformation optimization of the source code” (abstract), which relates to the disclosed polyhedral scheduling method.
Chang (US 2006/0236305) teaches “the source code, or may be automatically included in some intermediate representation of the source code. This example uses the polyhedra domain as the policy domain” (¶ 59), which relates to the disclosed polyhedral scheduling method.
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to JACOB D DASCOMB whose telephone number is (571)272-9993. The examiner can normally be reached M-F 9:00-5:00.
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/JACOB D DASCOMB/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2198