1. A method of distributed hardware device simulation, the method comprising: identifying a plurality of hardware components of the hardware device; providing software components simulating the functionality of each hardware component, wherein the software components are installed on compute nodes of a distributed processing system; receiving, in at least one of the software components, one or more messages representing an input to the hardware component; simulating the operation of the hardware component with the software component, thereby generating an output of the software component representing the output of the hardware component; and sending, from the software component to at least one other software component, one or more messages representing the output of the hardware component.