Retargetting GCC for fictitious processors

["Marty Hauff" <marty dot hauff at rmit dot edu dot au>]

Dear all,

I am a PhD student attempting to determine a way to find the optimal mix of hardware and software in a given embedded application - i.e. more hardware generally equals faster performance (maybe) but is more expensive to produce.  Less hardware is cheaper but may not meet performance requirements.  The research I am doing will attempt to take a test application and recompile it for a number of fictitious processors and attempt to work out which processor will yield the "best" solution.
In order to do this I need to be able to tweak the machine descriptions etc. and reasonably easily (one day automatically) rebuild the compiler for the new machine.  I have considered other compilers however GCC seems to offer the best mix of maturity vs accessibility.
As I have quickly found out, however, retargeting GCC is not just a single afternoon affair - It wants your life!
My questions to the group are:
* Do you know of or have heard of anyone (dead or alive) attempting a similar feat?
* Does anyone have any minimalistic machine descriptions that might be useless in a practical sense but at least make it through a full compilation.  I have tried this myself but so far the compiler crashes out with a segmentation error when compiling libgcc2.c and I'm stumped to know how to proceed.
* Is anyone interested in working with me - shared publications and all that sort of stuff....

I look forward to the wave of emails.....

Marty Moose!