  Adaptive optics systems are essential on all large telescopes where image
quality is important. These are complex systems with many design parameters
requiring optimisation before good performance can be achieved. The simulation
of adaptive optics systems is therefore necessary to categorise the expected
performance. This paper describes an adaptive optics simulation platform,
developed at Durham University, which can be used to simulate adaptive optics
systems on the largest proposed future extremely large telescopes (ELTs) as
well as current systems. This platform is modular, object oriented and has the
benefit of hardware application acceleration which can be used to improve the
simulation performance, essential for ensuring that the run time of a given
simulation is acceptable. The simulation platform described here can be highly
parallelised using parallelisation techniques suited for adaptive optics
simulation, whilst still offering the user complete control while the
simulation is running. Results from the simulation of a ground layer adaptive
optics system are provided as an example to demonstrate the flexibility of this
simulation platform.
