Laslie Lamport is very influential in the field of distributed computation, here is his quote: "A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable'' is a famous Lamport quip. I would suggest to check the article about him. he's trying to formalize that field, which is very hard. So try to find out his works and research his contributions to the field. Even classical distributed computation is still active area of research (especially it's formal verification). thanks for the helpful comments, I edit the answer to add further links, that asks the question "why", about distributed systems. aws about pros of distributed computation, aws engineer about pros of distributed computation.
P.S also since the other answer also provided references, I think author got enough combined resources for the topic, I consider my answer worth to not delete, if there are other suggestions or comments I am very grateful for that, also if arguments will be further provided about irrelevance of my answer, I will gladly delete it. Thanks to this community that I am able to communicate about computer science with people around the world.