Abstract: The developments of overseas simulation software for ultrasonic testing are reviewed in this paper. And some overseas softwares - CIVA(developed by French Atomic Energy Commission), simSUNDT(developed by Swedish Simulation Centre for NDT), Imagine3D(developed by Canadian UTEX Scientific Instruments Inc.), UTSim(developed by Center for Nondestructive Evaluation of Iowa State University) - are presented. According to the developments of softwares, CIVA is chose as the main object of the paper, because it is the typical representative of them. Three simulation modules (Beam Computation Module used for calculating ultrasonic fields, Mephisto Module and Defect Response Module used for calculating interaction between ultrasonic field and defects) and the applications of CIVA in data analyzing, performance demonstration and design of inspection methods are introduced.