Politecnico di Milano Runs of benchmarks or a suite of benchmarks are inadequate to characterize parallel machines or to predict the execution time of applications with a computational kernel not included in the suite. Furthermore, the observed results are quite sensitive to the nature of the benchmark. In this paper we present a new approach to benchmarking of SIMD machines. The idea is to create and use a machine characterizer which measures the performance of given system in terms of highlevel language instructions (e.g. Fortran 90, TAO). The analyzer yields a set of parameters which provides the execution time for some primitive operations in the highlevel language. This approach gives us considerable insight into both the machines and the programs, since the effects of individual parameters are immediately evident. We present experimental results on Quadrics machines.