Ex Parte Chen et alDownload PDFPatent Trial and Appeal BoardMay 25, 201612823244 (P.T.A.B. May. 25, 2016) Copy Citation UNITED STA TES p A TENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE APPLICATION NO. FILING DATE FIRST NAMED INVENTOR 12/823,244 06/25/2010 Tong Chen 50170 7590 05/25/2016 IBM CORP, (WIP) c/o WALDER INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LAW, P.C. 17304 PRESTON ROAD SUITE 200 DALLAS, TX 75252 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 ATTORNEY DOCKET NO. CONFIRMATION NO. AUS920100107US1 7444 EXAMINER VU, TUAN A ART UNIT PAPER NUMBER 2193 MAILDATE DELIVERY MODE 05/25/2016 PAPER 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. PTOL-90A (Rev. 04/07) UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE BEFORE THE PATENT TRIAL AND APPEAL BOARD Ex parte TONG CHEN, BRIAN FLACHS, BRAD W. MICHAEL, MARK R. NUTTER, JOHN K.P. O'BRIEN, KATHRYN M. O'BRIEN, and TAO ZHANG1 Appeal2014-006944 Application 12/823,244 Technology Center 2100 Before ALLEN R. MacDONALD, HUNG H. BUI, and MICHAEL M. BARRY, Administrative Patent Judges. BARRY, Administrative Patent Judge. DECISION ON APPEAL Appellants appeal under 35 U.S.C. § 134(a) from the Examiner's Final Rejection of claims 11 and 16-28, which constitute all the claims pending in this application. We have jurisdiction under 35 U.S.C. § 6(b). We REVERSE. 1 Appellants identify International Business Machines Corporation as the real party in interest. App. Br. 3. Appeal2014-006944 Application 12/823,244 STATEMENT OF CASE Introduction Appellants describe their "application relates ... to mechanisms for arranging binary code based on call graph partitioning to reduce instruction cache conflict misses." Spec. 1 ("Background"). Claim 11 is illustrative, shown here with a dispositive requirement emphasized: 11. A computer program product comprising a computer readable storage medium having a computer readable program stored therein, wherein the computer readable program, when executed on a data processing system, causes the data processing system to: generate a call graph of a portion of code; weight nodes and edges in the call graph to generate a weighted call graph; partition the weighted call graph according to the weights, affinities between nodes of the call graph, and the size of cache lines in an instruction cache of the data processing system, so that binary code associated with one or more subsets of nodes in the call graph are combined into individual cache lines based on the partitioning; and output the binary code corresponding to the partitioned call graph for execution in a computing device, wherein each node in the call graph is weighted according to a size of code associated with the node and each edge in the call graph is weighted according to an estimate of a number of calls between nodes of the edge, and wherein partitioning the weighted call graph comprises performing the following operations iteratively until an edge having a maximum weight cannot be selected from unprocessed edges of the weighted call graph: selecting an edge from the unprocessed edges of the weighted can graph that has a maximum weight of the weights of the unprocessed edges; determining if nodes of the selected edge should be merged into a new node or not; and 2 Appeal2014-006944 Application 12/823,244 merging the nodes of the selected edge into a new node in response to a determination that the nodes of the selected edge should be merged. App. Br. 30 (Claims App'x). Rejections2 Claims 19 and 25 stand provisionally rejected under the judicially created doctrine of obviousness-type double patenting over claim 9 of co- pending patent application no. 13/444,907 (the "'907 application"). Final Act. 2--4. Claims 11, 16-18, and 21-24 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as obvious over: Ju et al. ("Ju") Ju et al. ("Ju2") Li et al. Archambault et al. Delong et al. Chilimbi et al. Final Act. 5-16. US 6,839,895 Bl US 6, 175,957B1 US 2005/0155023 Al US 2005/0246700 Al US 2007 /0286483 Al US 6,330,556 B 1 Jan. 4, 2005; Jan 16, 2001; July 14, 2005; Nov. 3, 2005; Dec. 13, 2007; and Dec. 11, 2001. Claims 19, 20, 25, and 26 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as obvious over Ju, Ju2, Li, Archambault, Delong, Chilimbi, and Kawaguchi et al. (US 5,926,632; July 20, 1999). Final Act. 16-20. Claims 27 and 28 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as obvious over Ju, Ju2, Li, Archambault, Delong, Chilimbi, and Kiriansky et al. (US 2004/0133777 Al; July 8, 2004). Final Act. 20-21. 2 The Final Action rejects claims 11 and 16-20 under 35 U.S.C. § 101 as directed to non-statutory subject matter (4--5), and the Examiner's Answer withdraws that ground of rejection (Ans. 1). 3 Appeal2014-006944 Application 12/823,244 ANALYSIS The '907 application, over which the Examiner provisionally rejects claims 19 and 25, remains pending. Because we reverse the Examiner's rejections under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a), we accordingly do not address the provisional rejection. See Ex parte Moncla, 95 USPQ2d 1884 (BP AI 2010) (precedential). The Examiner relies on either Ju3 or Delong in combination with Ju as teaching or suggesting claim 11 's dispositive requirement of iteratively processing of edges having the largest weight first, until all edges are processed. 4 Appellants argue the Examiner errs in finding the cited references teach the recited requirement. App. Br. 9-12, 14--16. While the Examiner correctly finds that Ju teaches an iterative process in which nodes are merged, we agree with Appellants that Ju does not teach or suggest the dispositive requirement of "selecting an edge from the unprocessed edges of the weighted call graph that has a maximum weight of the weights of the unprocessed edges" as part of an iterative process "until an edge having a maximum weight cannot be selected from unprocessed edges of the weighted call graph," as recited in claim 11. We specifically agree with Appellants that: 3 The Examiner and Appellants both repeatedly discuss the Ju and Ju2 references as if their disclosures differ. Ju issued from a continuation application of Ju2. Except for differences between their claims and abstracts, which are of no import vis-a-vis the rejections, the two references have the same disclosure. 4 The Examiner determines "Ju either discloses selecting of weight as in a) and iteratively performing selecting, determining, merging as in b) OR would have rendered a) and b) obvious." Final Act. 11. The Examiner also determines Delong, in combination with Ju, teaches or suggests the claim 11 's dispositive requirement. Id. at 11-13. 4 Appeal2014-006944 Application 12/823,244 essentially what Ju is doing is generating clusters based on a smallest power of 2 multiple of a cache line, and then using the clusters as nodes in a next level PEG in which the weights of the clusters are set to 1 and the weights of the edges between the clusters is equal to the number of edges between nodes in one cluster and nodes in the other cluster. It is noted that nowhere in this process, is there any selection of any edge in the PEG based on the edge having a maximum weight of the unprocessed edges. There simply is no operation anywhere in Ju that performs such a selection .... Reply Br. 9 (referring to the process described for Ju Figures 6a-b ). The Examiner also relies on the combination of Delong and Ju as teaching the dispositive requirement. Final Act. 12-13. Appellants persuade us that Delong's teaching of "partitioning a graph into regions based on a maximum amount of memory that is required to process the region of the graph" does not cure the deficiencies of Ju vis-a-vis the dispositive requirement. App. Br. 12-13. Because neither Ju nor Delong teaches or suggests claim 11 's specific requirement of "selecting an edge from the unprocessed edges of the weighted can graph that has a maximum weight of the weights of the unprocessed edges" "iteratively until an edge having a maximum weight cannot be selected from unprocessed edges of the weighted call graph," the Examiner has not set forth a prim a f acie case of obviousness under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a). We accordingly do not sustain the rejection of claim 11, and of claim 21, which includes the same dispositive requirement. We also do not sustain the rejection of claims 16-20 and 22-28, each of which depends, directly or indirect! y, from claim 11 or 21. 5 Appeal2014-006944 Application 12/823,244 DECISION For the reasons above, we reverse the Examiner's rejection of claims 11 and 16-28. REVERSED 6 Copy with citationCopy as parenthetical citation