I'm just an explorer too, but after reading Julia's Distributed Arrays Docs, I tried this which seemed to work.
$ ./julia
_
_ _ _(_)_ | A fresh approach to technical computing
(_) | (_) (_) | Documentation: http://docs.julialang.org
_ _ _| |_ __ _ | Type "help()" to list help topics
| | | | | | |/ _` | |
| | |_| | | | (_| | | Version 0.3.0-prerelease+2703 (2014-04-22 18:57 UTC)
_/ |\__'_|_|_|\__'_| | Commit 942ae42* (0 days old master)
|__/ | i686-redhat-linux
julia> versioninfo()
Julia Version 0.3.0-prerelease+2703
Commit 942ae42* (2014-04-22 18:57 UTC)
Platform Info:
System: Linux (i686-redhat-linux)
CPU: Genuine Intel(R) CPU T2250 @ 1.73GHz
WORD_SIZE: 32
BLAS: libopenblas (DYNAMIC_ARCH NO_AFFINITY)
LAPACK: libopenblas
LIBM: libopenlibm
julia> a=dzeros(5)
5-element DArray{Float64,1,Array{Float64,1}}:
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
julia> localpart(a)[1]=5
5
julia> a
5-element DArray{Float64,1,Array{Float64,1}}:
5.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
julia>
It seems that distributed arrays aren't "local" until you make them "local".