john-users - Performance tuning

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Date: Thu, 27 Apr 2006 17:45:46 +0200
From: Ami Schwartzman <samis@...technion.ac.il>
To: john-users@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Performance tuning

Hi everybody,


My name is Ami Schwartzman, and I'm a student of Computer Engineering at 
the Technion in Israel.


Me and my friend, Mickey Iluz, are doing a project for the software lab, 
and the project is performance tuning.

What we do in our project, is to take an open source project, try to 
make it better perform on the latest Intel processors (using threads, 
dual cores, SSE2/3, etc) and then return it to the open source 
community.  I remembered JtR since before 1.6 (I worked a little on it 
back then as well) and that's why I'm interested in working on it now.

A few questions:

1) More of a question to Solar Designer: I saw that you provide only the 
UNIX source, and we might (it's not sure yet) be doing it in Windows.  
Is it possible for you to provide us the Windows source?  I'm asking 
because we would eventually release the source back to the community.  
Will you have a problem with that?

2)This is to everyone who knows the source: Do you think there is room 
for improvement?  I'm asking because I understand that DES is pretty 
hard to paralellize.  Do you think threads, making it run on two cores, 
or utilizing SEE2/3 for example could improve performance?  I'm 
interested in other algorithms, not just DES.


Thanks, Ami.