This paper analyses the requirements of a toolset intended for integrated parallel system design. Real-time, data-dominated systems are targeted, particularly those in vision and image-processing. A constrained abstract model is represented based around software pipelines each stage of which can contain a parallel component. The toolset is novel in seeking to enable generalized parallelism in which the needs of the system as a whole are given priority. The paper describes the tool infra-structure, and reports on current progress on the performance prediction toolset element, including simulation visualizer and analytic support.