Patents Examined by Charles Swift
  • Patent number: 8832707
    Abstract: An attribute of a descriptor associated with a task informs a runtime environment of which instructions a processor is to run to schedule a plurality if resources for completion of the task in accordance with a level of quality of service in a service level agreement.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: December 21, 2009
    Date of Patent: September 9, 2014
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Daniel J. Henderson, Prabhakar N. Kudva, Naresh Nayar, Pia Naoko Sanda, David William Siegel, James Van Oosten, James Xenidis
  • Patent number: 8826289
    Abstract: Managing virtual and real machines through a provisioning system. The provisioning system allows a user to create and manage machines through a “self-service” approach. The provisioning system interacts with one or more agents that manage the lifecycle of a machine. The system may provide templates that enable a user to readily create a virtual machine. The system may also include interfaces for administrators to manage virtual and real machine resources.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: March 26, 2012
    Date of Patent: September 2, 2014
    Assignee: VMware, Inc.
    Inventor: Leslie Muller
  • Patent number: 8819683
    Abstract: A method, apparatus, system, article of manufacture, and computer-readable storage medium provide the ability to dynamically modify a distributed computing system workflow. A grid application dynamically receives configuration information including business rules that describe execution profiles. Channels based on the one or more execution profiles are defined. Each channel is configured to execute a work request in a distributed grid compute system (based on an execution profile). A first work request is received from a requestor and includes an identity of the requestor. The first work request is evaluated and the identity of the requestor is applied to direct the first work request to the appropriate channel.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: August 31, 2010
    Date of Patent: August 26, 2014
    Assignee: Autodesk, Inc.
    Inventor: Garrick D. Evans
  • Patent number: 8819665
    Abstract: An image forming apparatus executing a program configured by connecting multiple modules operating exclusively with respect to each other is disclosed that includes an input part configured to receive an input of updating information of the program; a determination part configured to determine whether an operating state of the program corresponds to a time for updating specified in the updating information; and a change part configured to change the relationship of connection of the modules in accordance with the updating information if the determination part determines that the operating state of the program corresponds to the time for updating.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: July 22, 2013
    Date of Patent: August 26, 2014
    Assignee: Ricoh Company, Ltd.
    Inventors: Mitsuo Ando, Kunihiro Akiyoshi
  • Patent number: 8819673
    Abstract: A virtual machine (VM) management utility tool may deploy an object model that may persist one or more virtual machine dependencies and relationships. Through a web front-end interface, for example, the VMs may be started in a specific order or re-booted, and the tool automatically determines the additional VMs that need to be re-booted in order to maintain the integrity of the environment. Through the web interface, for example, the object model may be managed, and start-up orders or VM dependencies may be updated. For VMs that may not start under load, the object model may block access to the VM until the VM is fully initialized.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: May 24, 2007
    Date of Patent: August 26, 2014
    Assignee: United Services Automobile Association (USAA)
    Inventors: Christopher Thomas Wilkinson, Neelsen Edward Cyrus
  • Patent number: 8806495
    Abstract: Described is a technology by which alternative use for transactional memory is provided, namely implementing atomic work items that are run asynchronously from their creation in a thread. Described are mechanisms by which threads control the work items that they have created. Atomic work items are scheduled on worker threads managed by the language's runtime system. Atomic work items can use retry to express condition synchronization, providing a general mechanism for controlling when and in what order they are executed. Work items may be grouped, with coordination managed among the grouped work items. Also described by way of example is a highly-parallel implementation of a Chaff satisfiability solver, comprising an example of an important group of applications, including theorem provers and constraint optimization systems.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: June 29, 2007
    Date of Patent: August 12, 2014
    Assignee: Microsoft Corp.
    Inventors: James R. Larus, Timothy Lawrence Harris, Virendra Jayant Marathe
  • Patent number: 8806489
    Abstract: Virtual machine images are distributed to, and retrieved from an image distribution network. A virtual machine image is received on the image distribution network and divided into chunks with a unique resource identifier created for each of the chunks. A virtual machine image reassembly file is created. Each of the chunks is assigned a unique resource locator address. An image distribution network server maintains a mapping between unique resource identifier for each of the chunks and the unique resource locator address. When a request to download a virtual machine image is received, chunks of the virtual machine image that are locally present are identified. Chunks of the virtual machine image that are not locally present are mapped to unique resource locator addresses in the image distribution network. When a sufficient number of chunks has been retrieved to instantiate the virtual machine image, the virtual machine image is instantiated.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: July 5, 2012
    Date of Patent: August 12, 2014
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Douglas M. Freimuth, Vasileios Pappas, Sumedh W. Sathaye
  • Patent number: 8806494
    Abstract: Determining execution rights for a process. A user selects a process for execution. A driver intercepts the execution and communicates with a service or its remote agent. Configuration data is accessed to determine an execution role specifying whether the process should be denied execution or should execute with particular rights to access or modify system resources. The execution role is provided to the driver, and the driver allows or denies execution of the process in accordance with the provided execution role.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: July 3, 2013
    Date of Patent: August 12, 2014
    Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
    Inventors: Mark Russinovich, Bryce Cogswell, Wesley G. Miller
  • Patent number: 8806435
    Abstract: A method and system to remotely log debug information is described. A computer executing program code generates debug information upon the occurrence of an error in execution. The debug information is then sent to a remote computer using a network adaptor. In one embodiment, the computer executing the program is Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) compliant.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: December 31, 2004
    Date of Patent: August 12, 2014
    Assignee: Intel Corporation
    Inventors: Ying'an Deng, Rui Jian, Caidong Song, Yuanhao Sun, Zhi Wang
  • Patent number: 8806491
    Abstract: A method and system to selectively move one or more of a plurality threads which are executing in parallel by a plurality of processing cores. In one embodiment, a thread may be moved from executing in one of the plurality of processing cores to executing in another of the plurality of processing cores, the moving based on a performance characteristic associated with the plurality of threads. In another embodiment of the invention, a power state of the plurality of processing cores may be changed to improve a power efficiency associated with the executing of the multiple threads.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: April 23, 2012
    Date of Patent: August 12, 2014
    Assignee: Intel Corporation
    Inventors: Qiong Cai, José González, Pedro Chappero Monferrer, Grigorios Magklis, Antonio González
  • Patent number: 8799902
    Abstract: A method and apparatus for throttling power and/or performance of processing elements based on a priority of software entities is herein described. Priority aware power management logic receives priority levels of software entities and modifies operating points of processing elements associated with the software entities accordingly. Therefore, in a power savings mode, processing elements executing low priority applications/tasks are reduced to a lower operating point, i.e. lower voltage, lower frequency, throttled instruction issue, throttled memory accesses, and/or less access to shared resources. In addition, utilization logic potentially trackes utilization of a resource per priority level, which allows the power manager to determine operating points based on the effect of each priority level on each other from the perspective of the resources themselves. Moreover, a software entity itself may assign operating points, which the power manager enforces.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: April 9, 2007
    Date of Patent: August 5, 2014
    Assignee: Intel Corporation
    Inventors: Ramesh Kumar Illikkal, Ravishankar Iyer, Jaideep Moses, Don Newell, Tryggve Fossum
  • Patent number: 8793689
    Abstract: A redundant multithreading processor is presented. In one embodiment, the processor performs execution of a thread and its duplicate thread in parallel and determines, when in a redundant multithreading mode, whether or not to synchronize an operation of the thread and an operation of the duplicate thread.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: June 9, 2010
    Date of Patent: July 29, 2014
    Assignee: Intel Corporation
    Inventors: Glenn J. Hinton, Steven E. Raasch, Avinash Sodani, Sebastien Hily, John G. Holm, Ronak Singhal, Deborah T. Marr
  • Patent number: 8793692
    Abstract: It is an object of the present invention to provide a program that can simply input dependency of tasks. The first aspect of the invention relates to a program, especially relates to a higher level language. The program requires only inputs regarding tasks and dependency. Then the program may decide all tasks and dependency such that it can schedule all of the tasks with error-free. After all the tasks are scheduled using the dependency determined using the program of the invention. Each task may be executed by means of other programs or hardware.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: October 28, 2011
    Date of Patent: July 29, 2014
    Assignee: Kabushiki Kaisha Square Enix
    Inventor: Duncan Tebbs
  • Patent number: 8789050
    Abstract: Systems, methods, and media for transparently optimizing a workload of a containment abstraction are provided herein. Methods may include monitoring a workload of the containment abstraction, the containment abstraction being at least partially hardware bound, the workload corresponding to resource utilization of the containment abstraction, converting the containment abstraction from being at least partially hardware bound to being entirely central processing unit (CPU) bound by placing the containment abstraction in a memory store, based upon the workload, and allocating the workload of the containment abstraction across at least a portion of a data center to optimize the workload of the containment abstraction.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: August 9, 2013
    Date of Patent: July 22, 2014
    Assignee: Joyent, Inc.
    Inventors: Jason A. Hoffman, James Duncan, Mark G. Mayo, David P. Young
  • Patent number: 8789056
    Abstract: A computer system provides a way to automatically generate compound commands that perform tasks made up of multiple simple commands. A compound command generation mechanism monitors consecutive user commands and compares the consecutive commands a user has taken to a command sequence identification policy. If the user's consecutive commands satisfy the command sequence identification policy the user's consecutive commands become a command sequence. If the command sequence satisfies the compound command policy, the compound generation mechanism can generate a compound command for the command sequence automatically or prompt an administrator to allow the compound command to be generated. Generating a compound command can be done on a user by user basis or on a system wide basis. The compound command can then be displayed to the user to execute so that the command sequence is performed by the user selecting the compound command for execution.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: February 19, 2013
    Date of Patent: July 22, 2014
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Brian J. Cragun, David G. Herbeck, Todd E. Johnson, John E. Petri, Leah R. Smutzer
  • Patent number: 8782645
    Abstract: A system and method for efficient automatic scheduling of the execution of work units between multiple heterogeneous processor cores. A processing node includes a first processor core with a general-purpose micro-architecture and a second processor core with a single instruction multiple data micro-architecture. A computer program comprises one or more compute kernels, or function calls. A compiler computes pre-runtime information of the given function call. A runtime scheduler produces one or more work units by matching each of the one or more kernels with an associated record of data. The scheduler assigns work units either to the first or to the second processor core based at least in part on the computed pre-runtime information. In addition, the scheduler is able to change an original assignment for a waiting work unit based on dynamic runtime behavior of other work units corresponding to a same kernel as the waiting work unit.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: May 11, 2011
    Date of Patent: July 15, 2014
    Assignee: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
    Inventors: Mauricio Breternitz, Patryk Kaminski, Keith Lowery, Anton Chernoff
  • Patent number: 8776057
    Abstract: In accordance with some embodiments of the present disclosure a method for providing evidence of a physical location of a virtual machine comprises launching, by an information technology (IT) resource, a virtual machine from a virtual machine image. The method further comprises generating, by the IT resource, a chain entry in a physical presence chain of the virtual machine image, the chain entry including an identifier of the IT resource indicating that the IT resource launched the virtual machine.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: June 2, 2011
    Date of Patent: July 8, 2014
    Assignee: Fujitsu Limited
    Inventor: Zhexuan Song
  • Patent number: 8776008
    Abstract: Some embodiments of the present invention provide systems and techniques for collecting task status information. During operation, the system can receive a status update for a task from a task manager through a GUI. Next, the system can determine whether the first status update for the task indicates that the task is delayed. If the status update indicates that the task is delayed, the system can request the task manager to indicate the help needed to resolve the task delay. Next, the system can receive a help needed descriptor from the task manager. Subsequently, the system can receive another status update for the task from the task manager, wherein the status update indicates that the help specified in the help needed descriptor is no longer required. Next, the system can determine an amount of delay associated with the help needed descriptor.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: October 30, 2009
    Date of Patent: July 8, 2014
    Assignee: Realization Technologies, Inc.
    Inventors: Ajai Kapoor, Ravi Shankar, Xiangting Yuan, Anthony H. Hoang, Prakash K. Pati
  • Patent number: 8776078
    Abstract: A method dynamically frees computer resources in a multitasking and windowing environment by activating a GUI widget to initiate pausing of an application, pausing CPU processing of the application code, maintaining data of the application in main memory, storing state information for the application code and a process of the application in mass storage, removing the application code from main memory to mass storage, when another application requires additional memory, activating another GUI widget to resume running of the application, restoring the state information for the code and the process to main memory before the application resumes running, and resuming the CPU processing of the application.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: May 20, 2008
    Date of Patent: July 8, 2014
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Arnon Amir, Nimrod Megiddo
  • Patent number: 8776075
    Abstract: A method for optimizing energy consumption in a data-processing system comprising a set of data-processing units is disclosed. In one embodiment, such a method includes indicating a set of data-processing jobs to be executed on a data-processing system during a production period. An ambient temperature expected for each data-processing unit during the production period is estimated. The method calculates an execution scheme for the data-processing jobs on the data-processing system. The execution scheme optimizes the energy consumed by the data-processing system to execute the data-processing jobs based on the ambient temperature of the data-processing units. The method then executes the data-processing jobs on the data processing system according to the execution scheme. A corresponding apparatus and computer program product are also disclosed.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: September 4, 2011
    Date of Patent: July 8, 2014
    Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
    Inventors: Davide Cosentino, Scot MacLellan, Ivan Orlandi, Ignazio Flavio Trovato