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KINGSTON, Ont. – Scott McNealy’s Top Ten List of what he likes about no longer being chief executive of Sun Microsystems Inc. includes being able to sell his last business suit and shave “even less often,” and responding to any tough question with “see Jonathan on that.” Number one on the list is that his new office is very close to the men’s room.

But seriously, since handing over the CEO’s job to Jonathan Schwartz, McNealy has been busy. “I’ve been traveling more,” he said. “I wanted to get out of Jonathan’s hair and let him grab the reins and make sure it’s clear who’s in charge.”

McNealy said he is focusing on four areas in particular – Japan, Sun’s large service provider customers, government and education. That last focus brought him to Queen’s University Thursday afternoon to help celebrate the expansion of the High Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory (HPCVL).

The HPCVL, a supercomputing facility founded in 1998 by Queen’s and Royal Military College in Kingston and Carleton University and University of Ottawa in Ottawa, has since added Toronto’s Ryerson University and Seneca College as members in 2004. It has 1,100 central processing units and 175 terabytes of storage spread across five sites.

Sun is the major private-sector supporter of HPCVL, which is the largest installation of its kind of Sun equipment anywhere in the world.

Delivering the keynote address at HPCVL’s expansion event on the Queen’s campus Thursday afternoon, McNealy said academic computing facilities like HPCVL play an important role, noting that Sun itself grew out of Stanford University and University of California at Berkeley.

“This stuff doesn’t have an immediate return on investment,” he said. “You don’t know where it going to go, you don’t know what’s going to happen.” But “if you don’t set that opportunity up, it just isn’t going to happen.”

Also speaking at the event, Dr. Kerry Rowe, Queen’s vice-principal of research, said HPCVL is helping scientists conduct pioneering research in ways that were not possible before. “HPCVL helps institutions fulfill their research mission and keeps Canada competitive in a fast-changing world,” Rowe said.

Dr. Karen Hitchcock, principal of Queen’s, noted that HPCVL serves researchers across Canada and described it as “clearly a national resource.”

McNealy used his keynote speech to touch on several of his favourite causes, including thin-client computing and the digital divide, with a few digs at rivals IBM and Microsoft thrown in.

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