Even though the two topics look different, there are actually several points in common.
Below is a list of topics, extracted from the textbook Parallel & Distributed Computing Handbook by Albert H. Zomaya, published by McGraw-Hill.
- PRAM (Parallel RAM) model; Methods for distributing and parallelizing algorithms
- Failures in parallel systems (Byzantine, other)
- Dataflow models
- Checkpointing (for recovery)
- Distributed software systems (this is similar to RMI)
- Data structures for parallel processing
- Shared memory, memory consistency