The fast inhomogeneous plane wave algorithm has been developed to accelerate the solution of three-dimensional electromagnetic scattering problems in free space. By expanding the kernel of the Green's function using the Weyl identity and choosing a proper steepest descent path, the diagonalization of the translation matrix is achieved after the interpolation and extrapolation techniques are applied. The proposed algorithm is implemented on top of the scalable multipole engine, a portable implementation of the dynamic multilevel fast multipole algorithm for distributed-memory computers. The computational time per matrix vector multiplication is reduced to O(N log N) and the memory requirement is reduced to O(N), where N is the number of unknowns in the discretized integral equation. The algorithm is validated by applying it to the solution of the electromagnetic scattering from the perfect electric conducting scatterers. This approach can be easily extended to more general problems with complicated Green's function expressed in terms of the plane wave spectral integrals, such as the ones encountered in the multilayered medium studies. ¿ 2001 American Geophysical Union