Peter received an NSF CAREER Award (1995), an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship (2000), the SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award (2008), a Microsoft Research Outstanding Collaborator Award (2016), and the EuroSys Lifetime Achievement Award (2017). He chaired the program committees of SOSP, OSDI, NSDI, and EuroSys. He served on the editorial boards of the Communications of the ACM (CACM), the Royal Society Open Science Journal, and the ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS). Peter is a member of the Academia Europaea and the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.

Peter's research interests are in understanding, designing and building computer systems. In the past, he has worked on operating systems, network services, peer-to-peer systems, and accountable distributed systems. Currently, he is interested in practical techniques to make distributed and mobile systems secure, compliant, privacy-preserving.