Abstract A special finite element method based on approximate component mode synthesis (ACMS) was introduced in Hetmaniuk and Lehoucq (2010). ACMS was developed for second order elliptic partial differential equations with rough or highly varying coefficients. Here, a parallel implementation of ACMS is presented and parallel scalability issues are discussed for representative examples. Additionally, a parallel domain decomposition preconditioner (FETI-DP) is applied to solve the ACMS finite element system. Weak parallel scalability results for ACMS are presented for up to 1024 cores. Our numerical results also suggest a quadratic-logarithmic condition number bound for the preconditioned FETI-DP method applied to ACMS discretizations.@en