[2] (*) Distributed operating systems; Andrew S. Tanenbaum and Robbert Van Renesse; ACM Comput. Surv. 17, 4 (Dec. 1985), Pages 419 - 470. Just read sections 1 and 2 and focus on the big issues not the details.
[6]
J. J. Dongarra, S. W. Otto, M. Snir, and D. Walker,
"A message passing standard for MPP and workstations,"
CACM, 39(7), 1996, pp. 84-90
[8] (*) Distributed snapshots: determining global states of distributed systems; K. Mani Chandy and Leslie Lamport; ACM Trans. Comput. Syst. 3, 1 (Feb. 1985), Pages 63 - 75
Also, here are a few paragraphs on why distributed state is useful, taken from "The Role of Distributed State" by John K. Ousterhout.
[11] (*) Andrew D. Birrell, Roy Levin, Roger M. Needham, Michael D. Schroeder, "Grapevine: An Exercise in Distributed Computing", Communications of the ACM, 25 4, April 1982, pp. 260-274.
[14] Donald J. Becker, Thomas Sterling, Daniel Savarese, John E. Dorband, Udaya A. Ranawak, Charles V. Packer, "BEOWULF: A PARALLEL WORKSTATION FOR SCIENTIFIC COMPUTATION" Proceedings, International Conference on Parallel Processing, 1995
[16]
George K. Thiruvathukal, Lovely S. Thomas, and Andy T. Korczynski,
Reflective Remote Method Invocation
ACM Java '98, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA and Concurrency: Practice
and Experience 1998.
[18] (*) M. Satyanarayanan, "Scalable, Secure, and Highly Available Distributed File Access", IEEE Computer, May 1990, Vol. 23, No. 5
[19] David A. Patterson, Garth Gibson, Randy H. Katz, "A Case for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID)", ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, 1988, pp. 109-116.
[20] (*) John Hartman and John Ousterhout, "Zebra: A Striped Network File System". In the Proceedings of the USENIX Workshop on File Systems.
[21]
K. Li and P. Hudak.
"Memory Coherence in Shared Virtual Memory Systems."
ACM Trans. Computer Systems Vol. 7, No. 4. Nov. 1989. pp. 321-359.
[22]
(*)
A. Cox, S. Dwarkadas, P. Keleher, and W. Zwaenepoel.
"TreadMarks: Distributed shared memory on standard workstations and
operating systems." Proceedings of the Winter 94 Usenix Conference.
USENIX Assoc., Berkeley, Calif. pp. 115-131
[25] (*) Gerald J. Popek, Charles S. Kline, "Encryption and Secure Computer Networks", Computing Surveys, 11 4, December 1979, pp. 331-356.
[26] (*) B. Clifford Neuman and Theodore Ts'o, "Kerberos: an Authentication Service for Computer Networks", IEEE Communications, 32(9):33-39, September 1994.
[28] Andrew S. Grimsaw and William A. Wulf, "Legion--A View From 50,000 Feet", Proceedings of the Fifth IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Compuing, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, August 1996
[30] Adam Ferrari, Frederick Knabe, Marty Humphrey, Steve Chapin, and Andrew Grimshaw, A Flexible Security System for Metacomputing Environments", Proceedings of HPCN'99 (High-Performance Computing and Networking), April 1999, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
[32] Alec Wolman, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Nitin Sharma, Neal Cardwell, Anna Karlin, and Henry M. Levy, "On the scale and performance of cooperative Web proxy caching", Proc. of the 17th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP '99), December 1999.