In large scale electrostatics problems, such as the simulation of proteins and cellular assemblies in structural biology, the Coulomb potential has the same form as the gravitational potential, except that charges may be positive or negative, leading to repulsive as well as attractive forces. Fast Coulomb solvers are the electrostatic counterpart to fast multipole method simulators. These are often used with periodic boundary conditions on the region simulated and Ewald summation techniques are used to speed up computations.