Frequent itemset mining (FIM) is one of the fundamental cornerstones in data mining. While, the problem of FIM has been thoroughly studied, few of both standard and improved solutions scale. This is mainly the case when i) the amount of data tends to be very large and/or ii) the minimum support (M inSup) threshold is very low. In this paper, we propose a highly scalable, parallel frequent itemset mining (PFIM) algorithm, namely Parallel Absolute Top Down (PATD). PATD algorithm renders the mining process of very large databases (up to Ter-abytes of data) simple and compact. Its mining process is made up of only one parallel job, which dramatically reduces the mining runtime, the communication cost and the energy power consumption overhead, in a distributed computational platform. Based on a clever and efficient data partitioning strategy, namely Item Based Data Partitioning (IBDP), PATD algorithm mines each data partition independently , relying on an absolute minimum support (AM inSup) instead of a relative one. PATD has been extensively evaluated using real-world data sets. Our experimental results suggest that PATD algorithm is significantly more efficient and scalable than alternative approaches.