I tried the following two links:
increase the simultaneous make processes. set to 4. ( I think my laptop has 4 cores.)
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1352419/why-does-macports-take-forever-to-build-simple-packages
and
disabling splotlight indexing.
http://x4350.blogspot.com/2011/06/building-atlas-on-macports-takes.html
then build atlas:
sudo port install atlas
