Associative Memory computing power and its simulation.

An important step in the ATLAS upgrade program is the installation of a tracking processor, the Fast Tracker (FTK), with the goal to identify the tracks generated from charged tracks originated by the LHC 14 TeV proton-proton. The collisions will generate thousands of hits in each layer of the silicon tracker detector and track identification is a very challenging computational problem. At the core of the FTK there is associative memory (AM) system, made with hundreds of AM ASICs chips, specifically designed to allow pattern identification in high density environments at very high speed. This component is able to organize the following steps of the track identification providing a huge computing power for a specific application. The AM system will in fact being able to reconstruct tracks in 10s of microseconds. Within the FTK team there has also been a constant effort to maintain a detailed emulation of the system, to predict the impact of single component features in the final performance and in the ATLAS data acquisition system. The FTK emulation is however a demanding software, we describe the efforts to have the best performance using commercial computing devices and some ideas for the future evolution.