The exemplary embodiments of the present invention provide a method for efficiently identifying the bad component(s) in a multi-node system. The method includes 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, and comparing the test statistics for the plurality of nodes against a first topology to generate a first number of clusters of bad nodes. The method further includes 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.