  We develop a general distributed implementation of an adaptive fast multipole
method in three space dimensions. We rely on a balanced type of adaptive space
discretisation which supports a highly transparent and fully distributed
implementation. A complexity analysis indicates favorable scaling properties
and numerical experiments on up to 512 cores and 1 billion source points verify
them. The parameters controlling the algorithm are subject to in-depth
experiments and the performance response to the input parameters implies that
the overall implementation is well-suited to automated tuning.
