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 .
DETAILED ACTION
This communication is in response to application filed on 6/04/2025 in which claims 1-20 are pending.
Information Disclosure Statement
The information disclosure statement (IDS) submitted on 3/17/2026, and 5/08/2026 is in compliance with the provisions of 37 CFR 1.97. Accordingly, the information disclosure statement is being considered by the examiner.
Specification
Objection to the Abstract
The content of a patent abstract should be such as to enable the reader thereof,
regardless of his or her degree of familiarity with patent documents, to determine quickly from a cursory inspection of the abstract the nature and gist of the technical disclosure and that which is new in the art to which the invention pertains (MPEP 608.01 (b)). The abstract of the disclosure is objected to because the current abstract merely repeats the claim language and does not enable the reader thereof to determine the nature and gist of the technical disclosure and that which is new in the art to which the invention pertains. Correction is required. See MPEP § 608.01 (b).
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 112
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112(b):
(b) CONCLUSION.—The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor regards as the invention.
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph:
The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the applicant regards as his invention.
Claims 1-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph, as being indefinite for failing to particularly point out and distinctly claim the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor, or for pre-AIA the applicant regards as the invention.
Claim 1: The term "through" in line 1 is a relative term which renders the claim indefinite. The term "through" is not defined by the claim, the specification does not provide a standard for ascertaining the requisite degree, and one of ordinary skill in the art would not be reasonably apprised of the scope of the invention.
Claim 1: The term "that depends" in line 4 is a relative term which renders the claim indefinite. The term "that depends" is not defined by the claim, the specification does not provide a standard for ascertaining the requisite degree, and one of ordinary skill in the art would not be reasonably apprised of the scope of the invention.
Claim 16: The term "that depends" in line 5 is a relative term which renders the claim indefinite. The term "that depends" is not defined by the claim, the specification does not provide a standard for ascertaining the requisite degree, and one of ordinary skill in the art would not be reasonably apprised of the scope of the invention.
Claim 1: The term "earlier" in line 5 is a relative term which renders the claim indefinite. The term "earlier" is not defined by the claim, the specification does not provide a standard for ascertaining the requisite degree, and one of ordinary skill in the art would not be reasonably apprised of the scope of the invention.
Claim 16: The term "earlier" in line 6 is a relative term which renders the claim indefinite. The term "earlier" is not defined by the claim, the specification does not provide a standard for ascertaining the requisite degree, and one of ordinary skill in the art would not be reasonably apprised of the scope of the invention.
Claim 1: The term "other" in line 6 is a relative term which renders the claim indefinite. The term "other" is not defined by the claim, the specification does not provide a standard for ascertaining the requisite degree, and one of ordinary skill in the art would not be reasonably apprised of the scope of the invention.
Claim 16: The term "other" in line 7 is a relative term which renders the claim indefinite. The term "other" is not defined by the claim, the specification does not provide a standard for ascertaining the requisite degree, and one of ordinary skill in the art would not be reasonably apprised of the scope of the invention.
Claim 1: The term "waiting" in line 7 is a relative term which renders the claim indefinite. The term "waiting" is not defined by the claim, the specification does not provide a standard for ascertaining the requisite degree, and one of ordinary skill in the art would not be reasonably apprised of the scope of the invention.
Claim 1: The term "can be" in line 8 is a relative term which renders the claim indefinite. The term "can be" is not defined by the claim, the specification does not provide a standard for ascertaining the requisite degree, and one of ordinary skill in the art would not be reasonably apprised of the scope of the invention.
The dependent claims included in the statement of rejection but not specifically addressed in the body of rejection have inherited the deficiencies of their respective parent claim and have not resolved the deficiencies. Therefore, they are rejected based on the same rationale as applied to their respective parent claims above.
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.
Claim(s) 1-20 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Gupte et al. (US 20220035684 A1) hereinafter “Gupte” in view of Klenk et al. (US 20210037107 A1) hereinafter “Klenk”.
As to claim 1, Gupte discloses a method of managing communication between endpoint processing units (EPUs) through a network comprising a plurality of forwarding elements, the EPUs collectively executing a distributed application (Gupte [60-61, 68-71], discloses wherein clients include threads of a set of applications such as a video analytics pipeline and similar applications that are executed by the processor causes the units of work to be distributed between a first hardware accelerator and a second hardware accelerator), the method comprising:
for a first operation that a first EPU executes for the distributed application and that depends on a set of two or more operations of the distributed application that are executed earlier by a set of two or more other EPUs (Gupte [70-71, 81-83], discloses wherein load balancer executes as a separate and/or dedicated process or as a separate thread in the application process executed by the processor ):
waiting to receive confirmation that all EPUs in the set of the EPUs have completed their operations and have results that can be forwarded to the first EPU (Gupte [275, 282-284], discloses wherein receiving a system call, operating system may verify that application has registered and receive confirmation that it has been given authority to use graphics acceleration module); and
Gupte is silent on after receiving said confirmations from all EPUs in the set of EPUs, sending a set of one or more instructions that direct the set of EPUs to forward their results to the first EPU.
However, Klenk [159-161, 165-170], discloses wherein the endpoint transmits m/p pull requests to the network, which are multicast to the p participating endpoints, and at one or more endpoints receive m/p responses that contain the results for the computation).
Gupte and Klenk are analogous art because they are from the same field of endeavor, namely, systems and methods of communication via network node. before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art, having the teachings of Gupte and Klenk before him or her, to modify the dynamic load balancing system of Gupte to include the scalable in-network computation of Klenk with reasonable expectation that this would result in a system that is capable of sending/transmitting instructions/requests to forward results to the node/unit. This method of improving the dynamic load balancing of operations of Gupte was well within the ordinary ability of one of ordinary skill in the art based on the teachings of Klenk. Therefore, it would have been obvious to one having ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to combine the teachings of Gupte with Klenk to obtain the invention as specified in claim 1.
Claim 2, Gupte-Klenk discloses the method of claim 1, wherein the EPUs are graphics processing units (GPUs) (Gupte [57, 61], graphics processing units). The Examiner supplies the same rationale for the combination of references Gupte and Klenk as in claim 1 above.
Claim 3, Gupte-Klenk discloses the method of claim 1, wherein the EPUs comprise at least one of graphics processing units (GPUs), tensor processing units (TPUs) and central processing units (CPUs) (Gupte [97-98, 149], discloses, graphics processing unit (GPU), one or more Tensor processing units (“TPUs”), central processing unit (“CPU”)). The Examiner supplies the same rationale for the combination of references Gupte and Klenk as in claim 1 above.
Claim 4, Gupte-Klenk discloses the method of claim 1 further comprising assigning the set of operations to the set of EPUs before receiving confirmations from the EPUs in the set (Gupte [85-87, 539], discloses, includes assigning client(s) to a first hardware accelerator, wherein assigning a set of clients to a first hardware accelerator, where a first client of the set of clients provides a batch of frames for processing ). The Examiner supplies the same rationale for the combination of references Gupte and Klenk as in claim 1 above.
Claim 5, Gupte-Klenk discloses the method of claim 1, wherein sending the instruction set comprises sending the set of one or more instructions to a set of forwarding elements associated with the set of EPUs to enable the forwarding elements to forward the results of the set of EPUs to the first EPU (Klenk [159-161, 170-172] discloses wherein result is forwarded to the participating endpoints based on completion of the operation). The Examiner supplies the same rationale for the combination of references Gupte and Klenk as in claim 1 above.
Claim 6, Gupte-Klenk discloses the method of claim 5, wherein the set of instructions comprises a set of scheduling parameters used to schedule the EPUs use of the network (Klenk [70-73] discloses a scheduling unit, wherein the tasks are managed by the scheduler unit and dispatched to a GPC by the work distribution unit). The Examiner supplies the same rationale for the combination of references Gupte and Klenk as in claim 5 above.
Claim 7, Gupte-Klenk discloses the method of claim 6 further comprising identifying a time for each EPU in the set of EPUs to forward the EPU's result through the network (Klenk [70-73, 170] discloses a scheduling unit, wherein the tasks are managed by the scheduler unit and dispatched to a GPC by the work distribution unit). The Examiner supplies the same rationale for the combination of references Gupte and Klenk as in claim 6 above.
Claim 8, Gupte-Klenk discloses the method of claim 7, wherein the set of scheduling parameters for each EPU in the set of EPUs comprises the time computed for that EPU (Klenk [70-71, 89-90, 146] discloses wherein each endpoint adjusts the parameters of a neural network based on a loss function applied to results from a batch of training samples, the parameters are shared with all other endpoints associated with different batches). The Examiner supplies the same rationale for the combination of references Gupte and Klenk as in claim 7 above.
Claim 9, Gupte-Klenk discloses the method of claim 6 further comprising identifying a rate for each EPU in the set of EPUs to use to forward the EPU's result through the network (Klenk [70-71, 86, 109] discloses wherein the NVLinks provides a data transfer rate of 25 Gigabytes/second in each direction, with six links providing 300 Gigabytes/second). The Examiner supplies the same rationale for the combination of references Gupte and Klenk as in claim 6 above.
Claim 10, Gupte-Klenk discloses the method of claim 5, wherein the set of forwarding elements comprises a network interface of each EPU that connects the EPU to one or more other forwarding elements of the network, the EPU network interfaces receiving the generated instructions (Klenk [70-71, 89-90, 146] discloses wherein the application can generate instructions, API calls that cause the driver kernel to generate one or more tasks for execution). The Examiner supplies the same rationale for the combination of references Gupte and Klenk as in claim 5 above.
Claim 11, Gupte-Klenk discloses the method of claim 1, wherein said waiting and sending are operations performed by a first forwarding element (Gupte [63-64, 85-86], discloses wherein the load balancer 104 includes a set of heuristics that include operations to perform based at least in part on the statistical information, and the load balancer will wait an interval of time for the effect of the reassignment to take place). The Examiner supplies the same rationale for the combination of references Gupte and Klenk as in claim 1 above.
Claim 12, Gupte-Klenk discloses the method of claim 11, wherein the first forwarding element is a first-hop forwarding element that is connected to the first EPU through a physical network link (Gupte [366-367, 389-390], discloses wherein neuromorphic processor include, without limitation, any suitable combination of recurrent layers and feed-forward layers, including, without limitation, both sparsely connected feed-forward layers and fully connected feed-forward layers). The Examiner supplies the same rationale for the combination of references Gupte and Klenk as in claim 11 above.
Claim 13, Gupte-Klenk discloses the method of claim 12, wherein the first EPU comprises a network interface having a plurality of ports, and the first-hop forwarding element connects to a port of the network interface through the physical network link (Gupte [226-227], discloses wherein a system logic chip may provide a graphics port for coupling to a graphics controller). The Examiner supplies the same rationale for the combination of references Gupte and Klenk as in claim 12 above.
Claim 14, Gupte-Klenk discloses the method of claim 12, wherein the first forwarding element comprises a data plane circuit to forward data messages between the EPUs and a control plane circuit to configure the data plane circuit, said control plane circuit performing the waiting and sending operations (Gupte [406, 445-446], discloses wherein a graphics SoC interface can also implement power management controls for graphics processor core and enable an interface between a clock domain of graphics processor core and other clock domains within an SoC). The Examiner supplies the same rationale for the combination of references Gupte and Klenk as in claim 12 above.
Claim 15, Gupte-Klenk discloses the method of claim 1, wherein said waiting and sending are operations performed by a control plane proxy server used by a first-hop forwarding element that is connected to the first EPU through a physical network link (Gupte [251-254], discloses wherein the interface provides connectivity to proxy circuit over high-speed link and an interface connects graphics acceleration module). The Examiner supplies the same rationale for the combination of references Gupte and Klenk as in claim 1 above.
Claims 16-20 are corresponding non-transitory machine-readable medium claims that recite similar limitations as of claim 1-15 and do not contain any additional features with respect to novelty and/or inventive steps; therefore, they are rejected under the same rationale.
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure. See Form 892.
Correspondence Information
The examiner also requests, in response to this Office action, support be shown for language added to any original claims on amendment and any new claims. That is, indicate support for newly added claim language by specifically pointing to page(s) and line no(s) in the specification and/or drawing figure(s). This will assist the examiner in prosecuting the application. When responding to this office action, Applicant is advised to clearly point out the patentable novelty which he or she thinks the claims present, in view of the state of the art disclosed by the references cited or the objections made. He or she must also show how the amendments avoid such references or objections See 37 CFR 1.111(c).
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to Razu Miah whose telephone number is (571)270-5433. The examiner can normally be reached M-F, 9-5 EST.
Examiner interviews are available via telephone, in-person, and video conferencing using a USPTO supplied web-based collaboration tool. To schedule an interview, applicant is encouraged to use the USPTO Automated Interview Request (AIR) at http://www.uspto.gov/interviewpractice.
If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Glenton Burgess can be reached at 23949. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/RAZU A MIAH/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2454
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