The project is based at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California and involves Argonne National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as well as FEI and CEOS companies, and is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy. The project was started in 2004; the operational microscope was built in 2008 and achieved the 0.05 nm resolution target in 2009. The microscope is a shared facility available to external users.