Programming Models for Distributed Computation
>    There are problems that exist in distributed system environments that do not exist in single-machine environments. Partial failure, concurrency, and latency are three problems that make distributed computing fundamentally different from local computing.<p>IMO this can frame our thinking too much. Concurrency and latency are problems in single systems as well. It would be great to have single systems that handle partial failure, can be updated incrementally, etc. Thinking of 'distributed computing' as a different domain than single system computing is not a useful long term approach. In the end very few systems are 'single machine' systems, if at all - machines are all connected to each other and participate in other, larger, systems.