Lambda the Ultimate

For my honors thesis I'm creating a language that is designed from the ground up to be concurrent in an OO setting (perhaps using some variant of the Actor model). Since I have less than a year part-time to get a decently working prototype, I think it would be a good idea to target an existing that has good concurrency support already. I'm currently considering either BEAM or the JVM. I don't have real experience with VMs (and only some basic experience with compilers) but I really want to learn. Any suggestions on how it is to work with either of these at the bytecode level would be appreciated.

Besides concurrency the other aspects of my language which would be worth considering are that it is prototype OO and uses dynamic typing.

Thanks,
Basu