Appeal No. 2001-0048
Application No. 08/497,481
(Fed. Cir. 1984); In re Cofer, 354 F.2d 664, 668, 148 USPQ 268,
271-72 (CCPA 1966).
Our review of Vaswani confirms that the reference relates to
a scheduling order of tasks to be executed on multiprocessor
systems by considering affinity of the task in order to improve
processing efficiency. Section A.1 on page 31 of the reference,
as relied on by the Examiner, and the two preceding paragraphs,
state in part:
Introducing affinity to Dynamic requires that the
allocator have access to processor and task histories ....
We incorporated processor affinity into Dynamic’s
allocation decisions as follows:
A.1 Whether a processor becomes available for reallocation,
the last task to have run on it is identified using the
processor’s history. If that task (last-task) is not
currently active on some other processor but is runnable
with useful work to perform, and if the priority of the job
to which last-task belongs is as high as that of any job
currently requesting processors, then last-task is activated
on the available processor. Otherwise, the processor is
allocated to the requesting job of highest priority.
Therefore, Vaswani selects the last task to be executed if it is
runnable and has a priority as high as the highest priority
running task, otherwise selects the highest priority task.
Whether the last task is interpreted as the current task, as
pointed out by Appellants, or as the affinity task, as asserted
by the Examiner, Vaswani executes the highest priority task only
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