The application of the multiple shooting method to the continuation of periodic orbits in large-scale dissipative systems is analyzed. A preconditioner for the linear systems which appear in the application of Newton’s method is presented. It is based on the knowledge of invariant subspaces of the Jacobians at nearby solutions. The possibility of speeding up the process by using parallelism is studied for the thermal convection of a binary mixture of fluids in a rectangular domain, with positive results.