NSF Awards CSSI Framework Grant for ChronoLog Distributed Log Store
The National Science Foundation has awarded a collaborative CSSI Framework grant (OAC-2104013) for ChronoLog, a distributed and tiered logging system designed for exascale high-performance computing systems and large-scale data centers.
The Logging Challenge at Scale
Modern scientific workflows, IoT systems, and enterprise applications generate enormous volumes of log data. Traditional logging systems struggle to handle the velocity, volume, and variety of this data while maintaining the strict ordering guarantees that applications require.
ChronoLog addresses these challenges with four design choices:
- Time-based ordering that eliminates expensive synchronization operations
- Multi-tiered storage that automatically moves data across storage hierarchies
- Distributed architecture that scales horizontally to handle massive throughput
- Elastic I/O that adapts to varying workload patterns
Collaboration Across Institutions
This project represents a collaboration between Illinois Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago, bringing together expertise in distributed systems, storage architectures, and high-performance computing.
Applications and Impact
The award abstract names applications in finance, weather, medicine, geoscience, cosmology, and astrophysics, all of which produce activity data that must be recorded in order and queried at scale.