Abstract In the emerging field of multi-physics simulations, we often face the challenge to establish new connections between physical fields, to add additional aspects to existing models, or to exchange a solver for one of the involved physical fields. If in such cases a fast prototyping of a coupled simulation environment is required, a partitioned setup using existing codes for each physical field is the optimal choice. As accurate models require also accurate numerics, multi-physics simulations typically use very high grid resolutions and, accordingly, are run on massively parallel computers. Here, we face the challenge to combine flexibility with parallel scalability and hardware efficiency. In this paper, we present the coupling tool preCICE which offers the complete coupling functionality required for a fast development of a multi-physics environment using existing, possibly black-box solvers. We hereby restrict ourselves to bidirectional surface coupling which is too expensive to be done via file communication, but in contrast to volume coupling still a candidate for distributed memory parallelism between the involved solvers. The paper gives an overview of the numerical functionalities implemented in preCICE as well as the user interfaces, i.e., the application programming interface and configuration options. Our numerical examples and the list of different open-source and commercial codes that have already been used with preCICE in coupled simulations show the high flexibility, the correctness, and the high performance and parallel scalability of coupled simulations with preCICE as the coupling unit.