CLI Released

lifemapper




Group: Lifemapper Admin
Location: Lawrence, Kansas, USA
Joined: May 2003
Avg Posts/Day: 1.50
Posts: 222
Posted: Sep. 26 2003, 11:40 am by lifemapper

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Dear Lifemappers,

Today we are releasing a new kind of Lifemapper client. It is the Command Line Interface (CLI) Lifemapper client.

This is a type of client that has no graphical user interface. It only displays text messages. It was specifically designed to optimize the CPU usage and focus only on computing species distribution maps. The client was developed to fullfil the needs of users who are more interested in producing results and prefer more efficient use of CPU cycles they donate.

The CLI client is also designed to be portable so it can be used on different platforms. It is initially available for Windows and Linux users but more platforms will be added in the future.

For those users that are more interested in the graphics and the outreach aspects of the project, we will continue to support and develop the existing Windows screen saver and background application.

From the participation point of view, both clients are very similar. The credits for results returned are counted in the same way and the quality of the result is equivalent in both clients.
The most important differences between the screen saver and the CLI client are:
1) CLI client will compute work units faster as it does not spend CPU cycles handling the display;
2) CLI client is NOT very visually attractive;
3) CLI client has new features in comparison with the screen saver, such as: i) work unit caching (it stores additional work units on disk to crunch when the connection is down); ii) it keeps processing work units while downloading new ones or uploading results.

Soon the screen saver client version will also incorporate those new features as well.

The new client is avaliable on the Lifemapper website on the download section. (the crocodile above will take you there )

Enjoy.

Lifemapper Team