<jats:p>Abstract. A study of the scalability of the Finite-volumE Sea ice–Ocean circulation Model, Version 2.0 (FESOM2), the first mature global model of its kind formulated on unstructured meshes, is presented. This study includes an analysis of the main computational kernels with a special focus on bottlenecks in parallel scalability. Several model enhancements improving this scalability for large numbers of processes are described and tested. Model grids at different resolutions are used on four high-performance computing (HPC) systems with differing computational and communication hardware to demonstrate the model's scalability and throughput. Furthermore, strategies for improvements in parallel performance are presented and assessed. We show that, in terms of throughput, FESOM2 is on a par with state-of-the-art structured ocean models and, in a realistic eddy-resolving configuration (1/10∘ resolution), can achieve about 16 years per day on 14 000 cores. This suggests that unstructured-mesh models are becoming very competitive tools in high-resolution climate modeling. We show that the main bottlenecks of FESOM2 parallel scalability are the two-dimensional components of the model, namely the computations of the external (barotropic) mode and the sea-ice model. It is argued that these bottlenecks are shared with other general ocean circulation models. </jats:p>