I want to design a password cracker (I swear to you that I'm not using this for nefarious means, it will be used by my Network Security business), that tries every possible character combination for a 16 character password.

And you would use that to do what exactly? Explain to your customers that they need 17 character passwords to be safe?

Having a tool that unerringly cracks passwords isn't much good for anything but nefarious purposes. It wouldn't provide any insight into how good a password may or may not be.

The fact that the problem is too big for you to easily solve is a good thing. In fact, it's the whole reason we use passwords in the first place.

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";