1. A method for efficiently identifying the bad component(s) in a multi-node system embodied in a computer program product for execution on an instruction processing system, comprising a tangible storage medium readable by the instruction processing system and storing instructions for execution by the instruction processing system for performing the method comprising: assigning a unique ID to each of a plurality of nodes on the multi-node system; generating test statistics from a test on a plurality of nodes; comparing the test statistics for the plurality of nodes against a first topology to generate a first number of clusters of bad nodes; comparing the test statistics for the plurality of nodes against a second topology to generate a second number of clusters of bad nodes; and identifying the bad nodes by comparing the cluster sizes to a topology threshold.