[hiAndrewQuinn]

You take traditional non-distributed systems and push them to their limits in some regard.

"Singularity" systems are an abstraction afforded to us by the grace of the hardware we run them on. If you start pushing their performance hard enough, however, you inevitably get distributed behavior.

This is also a good potential career reason to try to make software which is as performnt as possible - you'll get all the tasty edge cases and complexity war stories to talk about.