Question: Parallel executing in Statistics:-NonLinearfit

I have a Maple program that fits a nonlinear function with 9 parameters to a dataset that contains multiple records; each record gets fitted separately. The records are ordered by a certain experimental variable (an angle of a target). The initial parameters for each fit are the solutions of the previous fit; in this case I get relatively good initial estimates and not too much trouble fitting. I use Statistics:-NonLinearFit to do the actual fitting.

Since this is a bit time consuming and I need to do this a fair amount of times, I'd like to see if I can't speed his up by employing parallel programming.

One way to speed up a fit is to compute the sum of residuals in parallel; is there a way to do this in Maple?

Another way would be to run several fits at the same time. The problem I have with that in this case is that I use the results of the previous fit as starting values for the next fit. I might be able to increase the stride of this scheme; i.e. for 4 processes, use the result of fit 1 as starting point for fit 5; fit 2 for fit 6 etc. But before I embark on this non-trivial change; can Statistics:-NonLinearFit even be used in this way (i.e. is it thread safe)?? My fitting function is an actual function (as opposed to a procedure with local variables) so I don't think the function itself would cause trouble.

I could also contemplate the Grid package; except that I am concerned about the overhead moving the data over to each node (although it would all sit on one machine with 4 processors).

I realize that I may have to do some experimentation by myself, but if there is any experience out there I'd like to know about it...

Mac Dude