What is best to do to test a custom circuit with large amount of data?

I did benchmark my circuit in ModelSim using the verilog file read function. But my professor said that the benchmark results of ModelSim is only a simulation benchmark results, not emulation benchmark results on FPGA chip. Since we are writing a IEEE TCAS1 (Transactions on Circuits and Systems I) paper, to increase our chance of our paper getting accepted, I thought it would be best to obtain all benchmark results from FPGA chip.