I worked on this for my masters thesis! The thesis was for a specific part but the group worked on the problem as a whole, see https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/172

I worked on this for my masters thesis! The thesis was for a specific part but the group worked on the problem as a whole, see https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/49844 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/49844 IMO there are two things that make the current abstraction of a computer as a unit make sense: - You (mostly) don't have to try to handle partial failures within a computer. Partial failures are what make distributed systems hard. - The difference in communication costs between two cores in a single machine is several orders of magnitude lower than communicating with a separate machine using commodity technologies. So while yes, "it's all just distributed" and you can use a common abstraction, a large enough constant factor difference means that you still will have to look through the abstraction to build a performant system.