The computation time required for the modelling of wavefront distortions over finite aperture has always been an important issue for applications like prediction of perfor- mance of laser designators and simulation of infrared scenes in the presence of atmospheric turbulence. In this paper, we show that the computation performance of the best pre- vious algorithm that models this phenomenon can be sub- stantially improved using high performance reconfigurable computing through acceleration of the key computationally intensive steps of the algorithm on a field programmable gate array (FPGA). Our best hardware implementation pro- vides a overall speedup of more than 8 times the original algorithm.