Yep! You can trace that thread back to Lamport's work some decades back.
The thing I find really compelling about this paper is that it's not tied to a single coordination method, though -- it pulls everything back to application level invariants. Human beings have a bad track record of reasoning about invariants in distributed systems, but computers are pretty good at that sort of thing... if we can specify our invariants explicitly, and let the machine figure out how exactly to spread that work out on the cluster, I think we'll come out far ahead.
