Appeal No. 2001-0048
Application No. 08/497,481
consider claim 1 as one group and the remaining claims as another
group represented by independent claim 3.
With respect to the rejection of claim 1, Appellants
recognize that the current/last task of Vaswani is actually the
task with the greatest affinity with a particular processor
(brief, Page 7). Appellants further point out that Vaswani
executes the current/last task if it is runnable and has a
priority equal to the highest priority task but executes only the
highest priority task otherwise (id.). Referring to the
situation in which the current/last task is not runnable or has a
priority not equal to the highest priority task, Appellants
assert that claim 1 differs from the prior art since it requires
the additional step of determining whether an affinity task
having the same priority as the highest priority task is present
(brief, page 8).
In response to Appellants’ arguments, the Examiner asserts
that Vaswani’s last task is not necessarily the current task and
“is determined by checking the history; e.g. a process having
affinity for that processor is located” (answer, pages 4 & 5).
The Examiner also argues that it is this last task which is run
if “that task is runnable and has a priority as high as any
runnable process” (answer, page 5). The Examiner concludes that
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