User Guide Overview

The User Guide covers everything you need to understand, configure, deploy, and operate a ChronoLog system. Whether you are standing up a single-node development instance or running a multi-node cluster on an HPC system, the sections below walk you through each stage.

What's in this section

Architecture

A top-down look at how ChronoLog is structured, from the high-level data flow to the internals of each component:

• System Overview — tiered storage, data flow, and component interactions
• Component deep-dives — ChronoVisor, ChronoKeeper, ChronoGrapher, and ChronoPlayer

Data Model

Formal definitions of ChronoLog's core abstractions and how data moves through the system:

• Data Model Overview — Event, Story, Chronicle, and StoryChunk as data structures
• Distributed Story Pipeline — story chunks, pipelines, and event sequencing across storage tiers

Configuration

ChronoLog is configured through a single JSON file that controls every component in the system. The configuration sub-section explains:

• How the ConfigurationManager parses and validates settings at startup
• Client configuration — connection endpoints, timeouts, and logging
• Server configuration — per-component settings for ChronoVisor, ChronoKeeper, ChronoGrapher, and ChronoPlayer
• Network & RPC — protocol selection and multi-node networking
• Performance tuning — story chunk sizes, acceptance windows, and storage tier knobs

See Configuration Overview to get started.

Deployment

Once configured, ChronoLog can be deployed in several ways depending on your environment:

• Single Node — the quickest path; a single script builds, installs, starts, and stops all services on one machine
• Multi-Node — distributed deployment across multiple hosts using the deployment script and Slurm integration
• Docker Compose — containerized deployment with service definitions and scaling