One thing about distributed systems is there are many, many organizations with small-to-medium sized infrastructures, so a lot of the solutions for the problems

One thing about distributed systems is there are many, many organizations with small-to-medium sized infrastructures, so a lot of the solutions for the problems of those organization's infrastuctures are already done and widely available. If you look at the largest distributing systems setups, they are so large they run into their own unique problems. Google has rolled a lot of its own solutions, I'm sure often out of necessity. So they write Dapper to do DS monitoring. Twitter writes Zipkin to do DS monitoring. For distributed storage, Carnegie-Mellon had solutions like AFS, which large DS organizations used. Google needed a different solution and made Google File System and MapReduce. Inspired by this, a project like Hadoop is started. Insofar as graphics and computer vision, the first non-dev Oculus Rift just started shipping a few days ago, and Oculus is already working on an improved version of it. HTC and Valve's Vive was just released a few days ago. So a lot of innovation is happening in graphics and computer vision right now.