Obviousness

Obviousness Analysis Under 35 U.S.C. § 103

This analysis evaluates whether the invention claimed in U.S. Patent 8,352,584 would have been obvious to a Person Having Ordinary Skill in the Art (PHOSITA) at the time the invention was made, considering the priority date of October 30, 2007. The analysis combines teachings from the prior art references identified in the preceding section.

A PHOSITA in this context would be an individual with a degree in computer science or a related field and several years of experience in distributed systems, network architecture, and data center operations, including familiarity with different types of computing clusters like High-Performance Computing (HPC).

Summary of Obviousness Argument

The independent claims of the '584 patent are likely obvious under 35 U.S.C. § 103. The core elements—a third-party hosting service providing customized, isolated computing environments to remote clients over a public network—are taught by prior art such as US 2009/0019535 A1 ('535) and US 2006/0143350 A1 ('350). The novel element claimed in the '584 patent is the specific application of this hosting model to High-Performance Computing (HPC) clusters. However, at the time of the invention, HPC clusters were a well-known computing architecture with known benefits and significant barriers to adoption (cost, maintenance, expertise), as explicitly noted in the '584 patent's own background section. Applying the known flexible hosting model from the prior art to this known type of computing cluster to solve this known market problem would have been an obvious step yielding predictable results.

Primary Combination Rendering Claims Obvious

Combination: US 2009/0019535 A1 ('535) in view of the general knowledge of a PHOSITA regarding HPC clusters.

• What '535 Teaches: The '535 application teaches a remote hosting system where a customer can design and provision a custom, dedicated server infrastructure in real-time. This system explicitly supports multi-tenancy, providing different isolated infrastructures to different customers. '535 discloses:

  • A hosting provider architecture with a private communications network linked to a public communications network for client access.
  • The creation of a first cluster for a first client and a second cluster for a second client, where the configurations are user-defined and therefore differ (first configuration vs. second configuration).
  • The necessity of isolation between client environments, which would be implemented using standard networking components like firewalls and gateways to limit a client's access to only their provisioned resources.
  • The inherent need for a monitoring system for the provider to manage the underlying hardware pool and ensure service availability.

• Motivation to Combine: The '584 patent's background (Column 1, lines 40-52) identifies a clear problem: companies need the power of HPC clusters but find them too expensive and difficult to own and operate. The '535 reference provides a clear solution to the general problem of owning and operating any server infrastructure: a flexible, hosted model. A PHOSITA would have been motivated by market demand to apply the hosting solution of '535 to the specific problem of HPC. Since the '535 system allows a user to select the computing resources for their custom infrastructure, allowing them to select a configuration of powerful nodes, fast storage, and low-latency networking to create an HPC cluster would be a natural and obvious extension of the service. This would not be an inventive step but rather the application of a known business and technology model (flexible remote hosting) to a known, commercially valuable application (HPC), with the predictable result of making HPC more accessible. The claims' limitation that both the first and second clusters are HPC clusters is merely an obvious implementation choice within the broader framework taught by '535.

Alternative Combination Rendering Claims Obvious

Combination: US 2006/0143350 A1 ('350) in view of US 6,438,705 B1 ('705) and general knowledge.

• What '350 and '705 Teach: The '350 application, with its early filing date, teaches the foundational IaaS concept of creating virtual, private, and custom-configured computing environments for multiple users from a shared grid of commodity hardware. This establishes the base multi-tenant hosting model. The '705 patent, while focused on managing high-availability clusters, establishes that managing systems comprising multiple, distinct clusters was a known concept in the art.

• Motivation to Combine: A PHOSITA starting with the flexible hosting platform of '350 would be motivated to adapt it to serve various known customer needs. The '584 patent itself places HPC, load-balancing, and high-availability clusters on equal footing as known cluster types (Column 2, lines 16-25). A provider using the '350 system would obviously seek to offer all these cluster types to maximize their market. Combining the teachings involves using the '350 architecture to provision a cluster and configuring it as an HPC cluster—a known type of cluster—instead of another type like a high-availability cluster (related to the subject of '705). This would be an obvious business decision to meet established customer demand, not a technical innovation. The specific architecture of gateways for isolation and a central monitoring system, as claimed in the '584 patent, represents standard, well-known design patterns for implementing the network isolation and manageability required by the multi-tenant model of '350.