A basic game of life implementation written in java i did a ways back.
Not horribly optimized or anything, but it is multithreaded. No command line options or switches, didnt feel like putting those in. Uncomment line 29 of math.java to "see" the threads.
To compile, just make. You need the java developement package. You need javac and jar. If you cant compile, just run the jar. java -jar life.jar should work.