PHEW: a parallel segmentation algorithm for three-dimensional AMR datasets - application to structure detection in self-gravitating flows

We introduce PHEW (Parallel HiErarchical Watershed), a new segmentation algorithm to detect structures in astrophysical fluid simulations, and its implementation into the adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) code ramses. PHEW works on the density field defined on the adaptive mesh, and can thus be used on the gas density or the dark matter density after a projection of the particles onto the grid. The algorithm is based on a "watershed" segmentation of the computational volume into dense regions, foll...