Reminds me of Makeflow: A Portable Abstraction for Data Intensive Computing on Clusters, Clouds, and Grids,
Workshop on Scalable Workflow Enactment Engines and Technologies (SWEET) at ACM SIGMOD, May, 2012.
Nice. Surprisingly, we weren't aware of Makeflow and kinda missed it completely. On the first look, it seems like Drake is quite a bit more feature-rich than Makeflow. Please see the designdoc and/or the tutorial video for details.
https://www3.nd.edu/~ccl/software/makeflow/