Re: distrbuted nmap?

[Jose Nazario <jose () biocserver BIOC CWRU Edu>]

regarding the use of PVM, it was raised that PVM, MPI and other Beowulf
solutions are fantastic for CPU intensive applications (like the molecular
dynamics simulations i run from time to time) but would be overkill for
something ike nmap.

i quite disagree. i think that PVM actually provides a nice framework for
what you would want to do with a distributed application like nmap. like
TCP, PVM keeps track of connections and messages sent, it has very good
error handling, dynamic group assignments and the like. it runs over TCP,
so it provides a nice reliable data stream over the WAN. heck, it even
works on NT (for the reportedly in the works nmap port to NT) these are
all the kinds of things you would demand in a framework for a distrubuted
application. just because it's not CPU intensive does not mean it's
overkill, i'm just asking why reinvent the wheel? 

parallelization points are readily seen in nmap, which is the trickiest
point to porting an application to any parallel structure like MPI or PVM.
as such, it shouldn't be a difficult undertaking for coding. the
difficulty will be in design of the model for how this would be
implemented. 

PVM is described in detail at http://www.epm.ornl.gov/pvm/pvm_home.html

jose nazario                                    jose () biochemistry cwru edu
PGP fingerprint: 89 B0 81 DA 5B FD 7E 00  99 C3 B2 CD 48 A0 07 80
Public key available at http://biocserver.cwru.edu/~jose/pgp-key.asc