The Los Alamos sea ice model, CICE, is a sophisticated finite difference grid point model. It has been a part of the National Science Foundation and Department of Energy community climate models (Community Climate System Model (CCSM) and Community Earth System Model (CESM)) for over a decade. It includes various physical and dynamical processes and is parallelized to run on large-scale computer systems. The CICE model was assessed in the CESM at different resolutions and target processor counts to better understand and optimize the performance. Several new decompositions and a new feature to reduce the halo cost were added to the model. The new decompositions better leverage land block elimination and take advantage of scaling opportunities in different computational kernels. As a result of these new features, the CICE model performance has been improved by up to 45% and has more flexibility to be run efficiently at arbitrary Message Passing Interface (MPI) task counts.