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To improve energy efficiency in data centres, in particular when targeting computing with large data-sets, it is vital to perform processing close to the data instead of moving data to compute due to the energy consumption for network usage. For FPGA-based data centres, this is an opportunity to use partial reconfiguration (PR) for moving compute to data. However, to take advantage of partial reconfiguration, users face design challenges induced by the FPGA vendor PR design flows, which require an accelerator to be compiled for each PR region or shell individually. This is an issue in data centres where different FPGA I/O layouts add a level of heterogeneity to the system. This paper introduces the concept of I/O virtualisation together with remote reconfiguration and shell-based FPGA virtualisation. This allows deploying the same bitstream on FPGAs with different I/O layouts over a network while supporting a …