This paper presents an approach advocating abstract clocks to represent data-intensive applications executed on multiprocessor systems-on-chip (MPSoCs) for facilitating the exploration of large design spaces. By using abstract clocks, the advocated method characterizes applications defined by multiple loop nests, as well as, useful loop transformations that contribute to an efficient application execution. It combines the advantages of optimizations provided by loop transformations and the precision of information on scheduling captured by the abstract clocks. As a result, it favors a rapid, and yet accurate design space exploration (DSE) of data-intensive systems