California Inventor Develops Least-Recently-Used List Management Method

ALEXANDRIA, Va., May 9 -- Jan L. Bonebakker of Mountain View, Calif., has developed a method for managing a least-recently-used (LRU) list.

According to the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "One embodiment of the present invention provides a system that manages an LRU list such that the rank, or position, of data records in the sequence can be determined efficiently. The system initializes an index field in each record to the record's initial rank. When a record is accessed, the system moves it to the beginning of the LRU list and appends the value of the record's index field to a 'change list'. The system then sets the record's index field to zero."

An abstract of the invention, released by the Patent Office, said: "The change list effectively tracks the records accessed since initialization, and combined with the records' index fields can be used to efficiently compute the rank of any record in the list. This ability to efficiently compute the rank of the data record in the LRU list reduces the frequency with which the computationally-expensive initialization operation must be executed on the LRU list."

The inventor was issued U.S. Patent No. 7,360,043 on April 15.

The patent has been assigned to Sun Microsystems Inc., Santa Clara, Calif.

The original application was filed on Aug. 17, 2005, and is available at: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7,360,043.PN.&OS=PN/7,360,043&RS=PN/7,360,043.

For more information about US Fed News federal patent awards please contact: Myron Struck, Managing Editor/US Bureau, US Fed News, Direct: 703/866-4708, Cell: 703/304-1897, Myron@targetednews.com