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 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 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.
Claims 1, 11 and 20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over McWilliams et al. (US Pub. No. 20080301256), hereinafter referred to as McWilliams in view of Chow et al. (US Pat. No. 8108590), hereinafter referred to as Chow.
As to claim 1, McWilliams discloses a method for processing an input/output (IO) request, comprising:
transmitting a first IO request (sequential write request, 384, Fig. 3B) from a source terminal (source terminal via sequential write request forwarded to map/data control, 384 / 386, Fig. 3B) to a target terminal (target terminal through less-fine-grained memory receiving page write, 378, Fig. 3B);
determining whether a second IO request (subsequent sequential write request, 386, Fig. 3B) shares the same page of the target terminal (data accumulated within a particular page of the write buffer corresponding to a page of the less-fine-grained memory, para. [1176]–[1184]) with the first IO request based on a first page size (page of write buffer, para. 1192) of the source terminal and a second page size (page of less-fine-grained memory, para. 1176 - 1184) of the target terminal (determining particular page of write buffer and less-fine-grained memory, para. 1176 - 1184);
the second IO request being after the first IO request (plurality of sequential write requests accumulated, 386, Fig. 3B); and
placing (accumulating in circular sequential write buffer, 386, Fig. 3B), in response to the second IO request sharing the same page of the target terminal with the first IO request (writes accumulated in same page of write buffer prior to flush, para. 1192), the second IO request in a queue for queuing up to wait for transmission (circular sequential write buffer accumulating pages prior to write, 386, Fig. 3B; flush control of buffer, para. 1193, Fig. 3B).
Chow discloses, what McWilliams lacks, page granularity relationship (page size defines write granularity, 22/26, Fig. 1A).
McWilliams and Chow are analogous art because they are from the same field of endeavor, namely storage system write buffering and page-based memory management for improving write efficiency in non-volatile memory systems.
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, having the teachings of McWilliams and Chow before him or her, to modify the write buffer page sizing and flushing mechanism of McWilliams to include the explicit page-boundary aggregation and page-granularity alignment techniques of Chow.
The suggestion/motivation for doing so would have been to reduce write amplification, prevent inefficient partial-page programming, and improve overall write throughput, as Chow teaches that data from several host requests may be accumulated as long as the page boundary of the page buffer is not reached and that the accumulated page is then written to the flash memory as a page unit (col. 6, lines 1-15; col. 7, lines 20-35).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to combine Chow with McWilliams to obtain the invention as specified in the instant claim.
Claims 11 and 20 recite the corresponding limitation of claim 1. Therefore, they are rejected accordingly.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 2 – 10 and 12 – 19 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.
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure.
Shveidel et al. (US 11163602) A method is provided comprising: initializing a first thread based on a first work request; and executing the first thread to complete the first work request, wherein the first thread is initialized and executed by using an Application Programming Interface (API) that is arranged to emulate a work request queue by initializing a different respective thread for each work request that is submitted to the API for addition to the work request queue.
Contact Information
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to JUANITO C BORROMEO whose telephone number is (571)270-1720. The examiner can normally be reached on Monday - Friday 9 - 5.
If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Henry Tsai can be reached on 5712724176. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/J.C.B/ Assistant Examiner, Art Unit 2184
/HENRY TSAI/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2184
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