A computer program that runs in a distributed system is called a distributed program, and distributed programming is the process of writing such programs. There are many alternatives for the message passing mechanism, including pure HTTP, RPC-like connectors and message queues.
A goal and challenge pursued by some computer scientists and practitioners in distributed systems is location transparency; however, this goal has fallen out of favour in industry, as distributed systems are different from conventional non-distributed systems, and the differences, such as network partitions, partial system failures, and partial upgrades, cannot simply be “papered over” by attempts at “transparency” (see CAP theorem).
Distributed computing also refers to the use of distributed systems to solve computational problems. In distributed computing, a problem is divided into many tasks, each of which is solved by one or more computers, which communicate with each other by message passing.
Source: WikiPedia