President Bush to nominate two and appoint one

President George W. Bush today announced his intention to nominate two individuals and appoint one individual to serve in his Administration.

The President intends to nominate Kenneth L. Peel, of Maryland, to be United States Director of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Mr. Peel currently serves as Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Development, Finance and Debt at the Department of the Treasury. Prior to this, he served as Director for International Environment, Energy and Risk Regulation Affairs at the National Security Council. Earlier in his career, he served as a Member of the Secretary of State's Policy Planning Staff. Mr. Peel received his bachelor's degree from the University of California, Los Angeles.

The President intends to nominate Gregory G. Garre, of Maryland, to be Solicitor General at the Department of Justice and designate him Acting Solicitor General at the Department of Justice. Mr. Garre currently serves as Principal Deputy Solicitor General in the Office of the Solicitor General at the Department of Justice.

Prior to this, he served as a Partner at Hogan & Hartson, LLP. Earlier in his career, he served as Assistant to the Solicitor General in the Office of the Solicitor General at the Department of Justice. Mr. Garre received his bachelor's degree from Dartmouth College and his JD from The George Washington University. # # #

For Immediate Release Office of the Press Secretary June 2, 2008

Kenneth Peel is the Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Development Finance and Debt. He is responsible for U.S. participation in multilateral development institutions, including the World Bank, IFC, the regional development banks, the Global Environment Fund, the North American Development Bank, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development. He is also responsible for U.S. international debt policy, including the Paris Club, debt relief programs for poor countries, and debt-for-nature swaps. Mr. Peel serves as U.S. negotiator for replenishments of the concessional windows of the multilateral development banks and oversees general development policy issues.

From 2002 until 2006, Mr. Peel served in the White House as a Director in the NSC’s International Trade, Energy and Environment Directorate. In addition to this position, he was serving as Associate Director for Global Affairs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

Mr. Peel first joined the Executive Branch in 2001 as a member of the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff. In the 1980s and 1990s, he served in a variety of foreign policy and international economic policy positions in the U.S. Congress, including Foreign Relations Counsel to Senator Chuck Hagel, the second ranking Republican member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and chairman of the Foreign Relations Subcommittee on International Economic Policy, Export and Trade Promotion. He also served as Foreign Affairs Legislative Assistant to Senator Olympia Snowe, and Republican Staff Director of the International Operations Subcommittee of the House International Relations Committee.

A native of California, Mr. Peel attended UCLA, the American University in Cairo, and the Johns Hopkins University Nitze School on Advanced International Studies.

Office of International Development Finance and Debt, United States Department of the Treasury. 1500 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W. Room 3205 MT Washington, D.C. 20220 Tel. (202) 622-0070; Fax: (202) 622-0658 Email: kenneth.peel@do.treas.gov

Yale computer scientists devise a 'P4P' system for efficient Internet usage

Caption: Data distribution under traditional, P2P and P4P architecture. Credit: Courtesy of Doug Pasko and Laird Popkin. Usage Restrictions: with credit given.

New Haven, Conn. — A Yale research team has engineered a system with the potential for making the Internet work more efficiently, in which Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) software providers can work cooperatively to deliver data. The way people use the Internet has changed significantly over the past 10 years, making computers seem to run less efficiently and putting strain on the available bandwidth for transmitting data.

Since 1998, the percentage of Internet traffic devoted to the download and upload of large blocks of information using P2P software has increased from less than 10 percent to greater than 70 percent in many networks. By contrast, Web browsing now accounts for 20 percent and e-mail less than 5 percent of total Internet traffic, down from 60 and 10 percent respectively, in 1998.

Professors Avi Silberschatz, Y. Richard Yang, and Ph.D. candidate Haiyong Xie in Yale’s Department of Computer Science are part of a research team that is proposing an architecture called P4P — which stands for “provider portal for P2P applications” — to allow explicit and seamless communications between ISPs and P2P applications.

The P4P will both reduce the cost to ISPs and improve the performance of P2P applications according to a paper to be presented at ACM SIGCOMM 2008, a premier computer networking conference in August 2008 in Seattle.

According to Silberschatz, current P2P information exchange schemes are “network-oblivious” and use intricate protocols for tapping the bandwidth of participating users to help move data. He says, “The existing schemes are often both inefficient and costly — like dialing long-distance to call your neighbor, and both of you paying for the call.”

The Yale team has played many roles in this project, ranging from naming and analyzing the architecture, to testing and to implementation of some key components of the system.

“Right now the ISPs and P2P companies are dancing with the problem — but stepping on each other’s toes,” said Yang. “Our objective is to have an open architecture that any ISP and any P2P can participate in. Yale has facilitated this project behind the scenes and without direct financial interest through a working group called P4P that was formed in July 2007 to prompt collaboration on the project.”

The working group is hosted by DCIA [Distributed Computing Industry Association] and led by working group co-chairs Doug Pasko from Verizon, and Laird Popkin from Pando. Currently, the group has more than 50 participating organizations.

“The P4P architecture extends the Internet architecture by providing servers, called iTrackers, to each ISP,” said Silberschatz. “The servers provide portals to the operation of ISP networks.”

The new P4P architecture can operate in multiple modes. In a simple mode, the ISPs will reveal their network status so that P2P applications can avoid hot-spots. In another mode, P4P will operate much like a stock or commodities exchange — it will let markets and providers interact freely to create the most efficient information and cost flow, so costs of operation drop and access to individual sites is less likely to overload.

“While ISPs like AT&T, Comcast, Telephonica and Verizon and the P2P software companies like Pando each maintains its independence, the value of the P4P architecture is significant, as demonstrated in recent field tests,” said Silberschatz. For example, in a field test conducted using the Pando software in March 2008, P4P reduced inter-ISP traffic by an average of 34 percent, and increased delivery speeds to end users by up to 235 percent across US networks and up to 898 percent across international networks. ###

Contact: Janet Rettig Emanuel janet.emanuel@yale.edu 203-432-2157 Yale University