Microbunching can cause an instability which degrades beam quality. This is a major concern for free electron lasers where very bright electron beams are required. A basic theoretical framework for understanding this instability is the 3D Vlasov-Maxwell system. However, the numerical integration of this system is computationally too intensive at the moment. As a result, investigations to date have been done using very simplified analytical models or numerical solvers based on simple 1D models. We have developed an accurate and reliable 2D Vlasov-Maxwell solver which we believe improves existing codes. In this talk, we apply our self-consistent, parallel solver to study the microbunching instability in the first bunch compressor system of FERMI@ELETTRA. This system was proposed as a benchmark for testing codes at the September'07 workshop on microbunching instability in Trieste.