We present a method for systematic examination and reduction of the state space of distributed systems.  The approach exploits properties of distributed systems to partition processes into <i>atomic transitions</i> and uses observations about partial orders among the distributed components to perform dynamic partial order reduction for state space reduction.  This paper concentrates on preserving reachability checks and deadlock detection for a fixed input of the system.  We present a search algorithm with a succinct representation of the search stack that requires only the current state in memory. We furthermore define characteristics to determine independent blocks of processes and propose and evaluate heuristics to guide the search to further state space reduction.  In combination with dynamic symbolic execution (also known as concolic execution), the approach also allows the generalization of a concrete run and gives rise to examination of the full input state space of a distributed system