This document discusses distributed systems and high throughput computing. It is a presentation by Miron Livny from the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Center for High Throughput Computing. Some key points discussed include the benefits of distributed and high throughput computing such as increased accessibility to computing resources and the ability to run large numbers of simulations. The document also discusses some of the fundamental challenges in distributed systems like data placement, identity management, and debugging distributed applications. It emphasizes that these challenges are difficult problems that are made even harder by the decentralized nature of distributed systems.