The EM-like reconstruction method for steady state diffuse optical tomography is a propagation back-propagation method and its sequential implementation requires excessively longer computation time. Hence we apply a parallel strategy to the reconstruction method. We divide the groups of boundary measurements into several nonoverlapping subsets and each subset of boundary measurements are handled by selected processing element. We take two-dimensional numerical experiments on a single Symmetric Multi-Processing system to test the performance of the parallel strategy. The computation time of the parallel implementation indicates that high performance of computation can be obtained. Besides, the more groups of boundary measurements are used for the reconstruction, the higher speed-up and parallel efficiency can be achieved. Due to the usage of memory, the curve of speed-up with respect to different numbers of processing elements appears a wave pattern while the curve of efficiency with respect to different numbers of processing elements decreases rapidly. Thus, for three-dimensional reconstruction problem, we can execute the parallel reconstruction scheme on a cluster which aligns multiple workstations by a network.