I just stumbled across the paper by Julien Vitay et al. (http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/ ... 2015.00019) who also developed their own simulator which they call ANNarchy. Unlike many other simulators their framework is explicitly aimed at simulating rate based networks. They use C code generation for speed and Python as interface language to define models. Looks neat!
They also do some performance comparison by using their tool for spiking networks (which is not its primary home turf). Their simulator shows good scaling behavior and they reproduce the main results on simulation speed and that Auryn is on the fast side.