  Numerical Simulation is an essential part of the design and optimisation of
astronomical adaptive optics systems. Simulations of adaptive optics are
computationally expensive and the problem scales rapidly with telescope
aperture size, as the required spatial order of the correcting system
increases. Practical realistic simulations of AO systems for extremely large
telescopes are beyond the capabilities of all but the largest of modern
parallel supercomputers. Here we describe a more cost effective approach
through the use of hardware acceleration using field programmable gate arrays.
By transferring key parts of the simulation into programmable logic, large
increases in computational bandwidth can be expected. We show that the
calculation of wavefront sensor image centroids can be accelerated by a factor
of four by transferring the algorithm into hardware. Implementing more
demanding parts of the adaptive optics simulation in hardware will lead to much
greater performance improvements, of up to 1000 times.
