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A comment on multithreaded programming: I recently tried the boost library (http://www.boost.org) and found its multithreading support fairly easy to use. It may not be the best threading API in existence, but for massively parallel tasks such as graphics, it is convenient and sufficient.

(I parallelized some renderer across rows of an image. I had a global atomic variable as row counter; each thread would increment it with boost::atomic::fetch_add() to obtain the row number to be computed next (and to terminate the thread if the number was > imgHeight). I used a boost::thread_group to wait for all threads to be finished.

For a Buddhabrot style accumulation of trajectories, it will probably be better to have an exclusive memory buffer per thread, and only merge all buffers at the end of the rendering. That way, the threads don't step on each other's data.)