Princeton Application Repository for Shared-Memory Computers (PARSEC) is a benchmark suite composed of multi-threaded emerging workloads that is used to evaluate and develop next-generation chip-multiprocessors.

It was collaboratively created by Intel and Princeton University to drive research efforts on future computer systems.

[1][2] Since its inception the benchmark suite has become a community project that is continued to be improved by a broad range of research institutions.

This posed a hen-and-egg problem that motivated a new type of benchmark suite with parallel programs that could take full advantage of chip-multiprocessors.

It was designed to fulfill the following five objectives:[8] Traditional benchmarks that were publicly available before PARSEC were generally limited in their scope of included application domains or typically only available in an unparallelized, serial version.