We present fast and accurate solutions of extremely large scattering problems involving three-dimensional metallic objects discretized with hundreds of millions of unknowns. Solutions are performed by the multilevel fast multipole algorithm, which is parallelized efficiently via a hierarchical partition strategy. Various examples involving canonical and complicated objects are presented in order to demonstrate the feasibility of accurately solving large-scale problems on relatively inexpensive computing platforms without resorting to approximation techniques. ©2009 IEEE.