As I pointed out a while back (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22974882), the "SHARD" system described in that paper didn't actually have anything to do with "sharding" as the term is currently used. It was designed to replicate data, but it didn't do any kind of partitioning; each replica stored a copy of the entire dataset.

For that reason (in addition to the low number of citations), I think it's very likely that the name is a total coincidence. Pretty much any word you can think of has been used by somebody as an acronym for some project.