hfof: Friends-of-Friends via spatial hashing

hfof is a 3-d friends-of-friends (FoF) cluster finder with Python bindings based on a fast spatial hashing algorithm that identifies connected sets of points where the point-wise connections are determined by a fixed spatial distance. This technique sorts particles into fine cells sufficiently compact to guarantee their cohabitants are linked, and uses locality sensitive hashing to search for neighboring (blocks of) cells. Tests on N-body simulations of up to a billion particles exhibit speed increases of factors up to 20x compared with FOF via trees, and is consistently complete in less than the time of a k-d tree construction, giving it an intrinsic advantage over tree-based methods.