Fast and accurate solutions of extremely large integral-equation problems discretised with tens of millions of unknowns

The solution of extremely large scattering problems that are formulated by integral equations and discretised with tens of millions of unknowns is reported. Accurate and efficient solutions are performed by employing a parallel implementation of the multilevel fast multipole algorithm. The effectiveness of the implementation is demonstrated on a sphere problem containing more than 33 million unknowns, which is the largest integral-equation problem ever solved to our knowledge. © The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2007