Cost

Total

All experiments behind the paper cost $37 of a $300 GCP credit allocation, covering simulation compute and LLM inference.

Per run

Estimated cost of one MACE loop run on a 2x2 mesh:

Core	LLM	Compute	Total
Ariane	$0.04	$0.08	about $0.12
PicoRV32			about $0.02
OpenSPARC T1 (exhausting a three-iteration budget)			an estimated $0.25, mostly its one-time build

Pricing assumptions

Item	Rate
Compute	e2-highmem-8, $0.36 per hour, over each run’s wall time
Gemini 2.5 Flash input tokens	$0.30 per million
Gemini 2.5 Flash output tokens	$2.50 per million; thinking tokens are billed as output

Measuring tokens

The run databases behind these numbers hold no per-call token counts, so their compute_usd reads zero. The LLM costs above come from re-sending representative planner and task prompts and counting all output, thinking included; thinking tokens were more than half of the billed output. MACE now records every call’s tokens, thinking included, in the llm_calls table; see Results and Metrics.