Appeal No. 96-1492
Application 07/666,162
examiner asserts that it would have been obvious to allocate
tasks in Liu using the distribution approach of Natarajan to
increase the speed of Liu’s system. The examiner also
observes that the order of task distribution has no effect on
the operation of the system so that it would have been an
obvious design choice to distribute tasks in the reverse order
as claimed. Appellants make several arguments in support of
alleged errors made by the examiner in consideration of the
applied references.
At the outset, we are of the view that the task
allocation techniques of Liu and Natarajan are so opposed to
each other that the rationale for combining their teachings
could only come from an improper hindsight reconstruction of
the invention by the examiner. Liu is specifically directed
to a decentralized system whereas Natarajan and the claimed
invention are directed to a centralized system in which a
first means assigns tasks to the plurality of processors.
Tasks in Liu are assigned at the request of processors which
are being underutilized. Tasks are then reassigned based on
interprocessor communication of respective workloads. Thus,
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