We present preliminary results of parallelizing the fast multipole method (FMM) for multicore processors using POSIX threads. Short-range interactions are straight forward to parallelize. We invoke multiple threads per compute core to alleviate partition and load imbalances. For the calculation of long-range interactions, we assign the multipole subtrees below a certain level to compute threads with affinity settings that conform to the interaction lists of the tree nodes and exploit the memory hierarchy. On a Sun SunFire X4600 with 8 AMD Opteron 885 processors (16 cores) running at 2.6 GHz clock rate and 64 GB of memory, we observe a better than 15x speedup compared to the sequential version of FMM-Yukawa for two sample benchmark problems of 10 to 100 million charges uniformly distributed inside a unit box or on the surface of a unit sphere and require six-digit accuracy.