[catern]

>The quote you pulled out mentions "distributed execution" being completely contained in a "single-program system" - isn't a single-program system, by definition, not a distributed system?

Nope. As the second paragraph talks about, there are other tools too (distributed languages) which also let you write a single program which is distributed. It's very common really - if you've ever written a shell script which performed some operations on another host with ssh, you've written a distributed program.

This is just another way to write a program which performs distributed operations, like using a distributed language or using ssh. (Well, rsyscall is the way to do that, this article is about an application of doing that, actually...)