One common way to get some load on a system is to compile a large software package over and over again. Something like the Linux kernel.
Get a copy of the source code, extract the tar.bz2, go into the top level source directory, copy your kernel config from /boot to .config or zcat /proc/config.gz > .config, the do make oldconfig, then while true; do make clean && make bzImage; done
If you have an SMP system, then make -j bzImage is fun, it will spawn make tasks in parallel.
One problem with this is adjusting the CPU load. It will be a maximum CPU load except for when waiting on disk I/O.