Abstract: Due to the fact that the exponential function expansion nodal-SP₃ (EFEN-SP₃) method needs further improvement in computational efficiency to routinely carry out PWR whole core pin-by-pin calculation, the coarse mesh acceleration and spatial parallelization were investigated in this paper. The coarse mesh acceleration was built by considering discontinuity factor on each coarse mesh interface and preserving neutron balance within each coarse mesh in space, angle and energy. The spatial parallelization based on MPI was implemented by guaranteeing load balancing and minimizing communications cost to fully take advantage of the modern computing and storage abilities. Numerical results based on a commercial nuclear power reactor demonstrate an speedup ratio of about 40 for the coarse mesh acceleration and a parallel efficiency of higher than 60% with 40 CPUs for the spatial parallelization. With these two improvements, the EFEN code can complete a PWR whole core pin-by-pin calculation with 289×289×218 meshes and 4 energy groups within 100 s by using 48 CPUs (2.40 GHz frequency).