This paper presents and characterizes the Princeton Application Repository for Shared-Memory Computers (PARSEC), a benchmark suite for studies of Chip-Multiprocessors (CMPs). Previous available benchmarks for multiprocessors have focused on high-performance computing applications and used a limited number of synchronization methods. PARSEC includes emerging applications in recognition, mining and synthesis (RMS) as well as systems applications which mimic large-scale multi-threaded commercial programs. Our characterization shows that the benchmark suite is diverse in working set, locality, data sharing, synchronization, and off-chip traffic. The benchmark suite has been made available to the public.