Millions rely on cloud services daily, yet researchers aiming to improve cloud security and performance often lack access to the underlying technology. Jeffery Lim, a computer engineer at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, addressed this gap with his master’s thesis by building an open‑source hardware platform compatible with single‑root I/O virtualization (SR‑IOV), giving academia a realistic cloud research environment.\ \ SR‑IOV lets virtual machines directly use a dedicated slice of a hardware device, cutting the overhead of traditional hypervisors. Major providers such as AWS Nitro and Azure Accelerated Networking employ SR‑IOV on SmartNICs to deliver high‑speed networking. Lim discovered that existing open‑source platforms either missed essential features or were impractical for research, so he designed and implemented two core components himself.\ \ The first component is a switching fabric that decides whether data should stay local or be forwarded across servers in multi‑VM workloads. The second is a network function engine built on eBPF, which runs security policies like firewalls to inspect and filter traffic. This engine’s design draws from Zaid Tahir’s doctoral work, adapted by Lim to run efficiently on FPGAs.\ \ Lim assembled two test servers at home and used the Mass Open Cloud’s Open Cloud Testbed to benchmark the platform, confirming its viability in realistic cloud settings. The project earned the 2026 Master’s Societal Impact Award from Boston University’s College of Engineering and will be open‑sourced after presentation at the IEEE High‑Performance Extreme Computing Conference.\ \ Beyond the platform, Lim’s effort enables researchers to leverage SR‑IOV’s performance benefits for studying cloud trust models, hypervisor hardening, and high‑performance data‑center design. As a Lincoln Scholar, he is also exploring extending SR‑IOV to embedded systems such as drones and satellites, where power and compute constraints are even tighter.\ \ Review: Lim’s work bridges a critical tooling gap in cloud research, providing a reproducible, open‑source environment that empowers future innovations in cloud security and performance.