Validation and computing and performance studies for the ATLAS simulation

We present the validation of the ATLAS simulation software pro ject. Software development is controlled by nightly builds and several levels of automatic tests to ensure stability. Computing validation, including CPU time, memory, and disk space required per event, is benchmarked for all software releases. Several different physics processes and event types are checked to thoroughly test all aspects of the detector simulation. The robustness of the simulation software is demonstrated by the production of 500 million events on the World-wide LHC Computing Grid in the last year.