Raytheon vs. Controller – Rejection On 3(k) Set Aside

In the matter of Raytheon Company v Controller General of Patents and Designs (2023:DHC:6673), the Delhi High Court has set aside a patent refusal that was based on Section 3(k) of the Patents Act for being related to a computer programme per se or algorithm.

Application background

The patent application was titled "Scheduling in a High-Performance Computing System" and was intended for high-performance computing systems (HPCs) that scientists and engineers use for modelling, simulating and analysing complex physical or algorithmic phenomena. The applicant highlighted before the court that a typical HPC machine design consists of numerous HPC clusters, the scalability of which was a problem in prior art due to constraints created by lack of sufficient bandwidth and the presence of unnecessary components that reduce a HPC system's reliability. According to the applicant, the claimed invention addressed these problems by disclosing a method for scheduling