i began work on a very similar project... which unfortunately was rather rapidly shelfed when i entered the professional programming world, and i had the love of programming damned near sucked straight out of me. my concept was this, there are a lot of specialized parallel architechtures out there, HyperCubes, Maspars, Dataflows, Toroidal Mesh, Vector Scalar, etc... and SIMD programming of these architechtures had basically become a very difficult thing to teach, being that very few universities had access to such awsome specialized hardware. I felt however that SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) paradigm programming taught some of the most valuable skills neccessary in parallel programming.

So what I began, was the construction of a retargettable emulator of sorts. It read a series of configuration files that gave it the opcodes, the intstruction set, the interconnection network, the API, etc... and basically, in a series of files, you could describe any parallel architechture and implement it in software... (and have students program for these "parallel architechtures")

The way I approached this was simple, I approached it from a very OO manner, there are a series of "tool" in a modern microprocessor which are universal accross damned near all architechtures (from registers (or accumulators, depending where you are), to timers, to clocks, to pipelines, etc...) and I defined a series of interfaces for abstract interfaces into these "chunks" of the processor. From then, I subclassed each one of the parent classes into a specific incarnation of a technology (abstract registers became 32 bit registers, etc...) and set up the ties. Eventually based on a series of subclasses and opcode logic instruction files, i was able to emulate one of the processors on a maspar MP-1 to about 40% reliability, but around then is when I gave up.

In a situation like this, you may want to study the way that other processor "tools" like disassemblers have been written, the way that they represent the opcodes, the instruction sets, the optimization and the pipelines. From there, I would create a series of abstract classes that implemented commonalities in an easily inheritable aspect, and then, i would go from there... (for the implementation of opcodes and instruction sets, may i suggest you invest your time learning formal grammers and look into the Parse::RecDescent module, to make your life easier?)

Wow... that was much longer than I invisioned it being... I hope it helps! And if not, hell, you got what you paid for :)