One of the first stages of the behavioural design stage of a project is to produce a time-independent algorithmic model which can represent the operation of the accelerator. This allows more flexibility in experimentation and structure of an accelerator and can provide a quick method for finding issues in the concepts of your accelerator. 

These models can be produced in a variety of languages and are not bound to hardware description languages so languages like MATLAB and Python are often chosen to build models. They can not only be used to perform architectural and behavioural exploration, but to also generate stimulus and reference data for the verification in the HDL implementation stages of your accelerator design where the generated output can be plugged straight into your design testbenches.