  The transition of fifth generation (5G) cellular systems to softwarized,
programmable, and intelligent networks depends on successfully enabling public
and private 5G deployments that are (i) fully software-driven and (ii) with a
performance at par with that of traditional monolithic systems. This requires
hardware acceleration to scale the Physical (PHY) layer performance, end-to-end
integration and testing, and careful planning of the Radio Frequency (RF)
environment. In this paper, we describe how the X5G testbed at Northeastern
University has addressed these challenges through the first 8-node network
deployment of the NVIDIA Aerial RAN CoLab (ARC), with the Aerial Software
Development Kit (SDK) for the PHY layer, accelerated on Graphics Processing
Unit (GPU), and through its integration with higher layers from the
OpenAirInterface (OAI) open-source project through the Small Cell Forum (SCF)
Functional Application Platform Interface (FAPI). We discuss software
integration, the network infrastructure, and a digital twin framework for RF
planning. We then profile the performance with up to 4 Commercial Off-the-Shelf
(COTS) smartphones for each base station with iPerf and video streaming
applications, measuring a cell rate higher than 500 Mbps in downlink and 45
Mbps in uplink.
