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The purpose of the IDS Smart Client is to allow large quantities of data to be transferred to your machine from a remote IDS instance. This could be many small files or one very large file. It is specifically to cover the case when the web service interface of the IDS to get the data directly is not convenient because the total volume of data is too large.
A "personal server" runs on your machine. You issue requests to it from a command line or GUI or from TopCAT. Files are downloaded individually from an IDS and stored in a location within your home directory. The location relative to to you home directory is smartclient/<dns name of IDS>/<icat.location>. where icat.location is the value of the Datafile.location held in icat. It is planned to make this configurable. It is possible that two IDS instances may have files with the same value of icat.location which is why the dns name of the IDS appears in the file path. The server is distributed with a GUI and, except for Windows, a CLI. Invoking the GUI or the CLI will cause the server to start up if it is not already running.
When topcat v2 starts up (or is refreshed) it checks to see if the server is running and if so will offer it the smart client as a download mechanism.
Both the GUI (which is currently not a thing of beauty) and the CLI allow you to see how many transfers are queued. Stopping the GUI does not, by design, stop the server component.
It is distributed as a .deb for Debian based systems as an RPM for RedHat based and as a .exe for Windows. A .dmg is being prepared for OS X 10.10. See: http://icatproject.org/misc/smartclient/ for the list of available installation packages.