I'm pretty sure you have to be targeting framework 4.0, which means VS2010, to have any of the Parallel stuff.

That will multithread a loop, but from the description, you want to make some specific number of threads available, so thread pooling certainly sounds like one option. However, you might find that it makes more sense to create your own threads and make something of your own pool. My concern would be that the thread pool might be a bit TOO efficient for effective testing. It might automatically adjust in ways that you wouldn't want.