Yeah, but I think the point of distributed systems is to be partition tolerant, the system that you are describing is probably not a distributed system by definition. Or is it, i don't know, I have a plan to read a book on DS this year.

From wiki, it looks like there are 3 main pillars to DS [1]:

- concurrency of components

- lack of global clock

- independent failure of components

So you need the failure tolerance part.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_computing