[en] The boundary element method has become a popular tool for the solution of Maxwell's equations in electromagnetism. It discretizes only the surface of the radiating object and gives rise to linear systems that are smaller in size compared to those arising from finite element or finite difference discretizations. However, these systems are prohibitively demanding in terms of memory for direct methods and challenging to solve by iterative methods. In this paper we address the iterative solution via preconditioned Krylov methods of electromagnetic scattering problems expressed in an integral formulation, with main focus on the design of the pre-conditioner. We consider an approximate inverse method based on the Frobenius-norm minimization with a pattern prescribed in advance. The pre-conditioner is constructed from a sparse approximation of the dense coefficient matrix, and the patterns both for the pre-conditioner and for the coefficient matrix are computed a priori using geometric information from the mesh. We describe the implementation of the approximate inverse in an out-of-core parallel code that uses multipole techniques for the matrix-vector products, and show results on the numerical scalability of our method on systems of size up to one million unknowns. We propose an embedded iterative scheme based on the GMRES method and combined with multipole techniques, aimed at improving the robustness of the approximate inverse for large problems. We prove by numerical experiments that the proposed scheme enables the solution of very large and difficult problems efficiently at reduced computational and memory cost. Finally we perform a preliminary study on a spectral two-level pre-conditioner to enhance the robustness of our method. This numerical technique exploits spectral information of the preconditioned systems to build a low rank-update of the pre-conditioner. (authors)